Design of circular polarized dual band patch antenna

Sammanfattning: At the moment Swedish Transport Administration uses a monitor system that candetect urgent errors as warm ball-bearings and flat wheels etc. with stationarydetectors. To avoid these errors Swedish Transport Administration, UPWIS AB andUppsala University work with a system that will continuously monitoring the train todetect the errors as fast as possible. This will save money in the future for SwedishTransport Administration and all other partners that use the rails.Swedish Transport Administration has already RFID readers beside the rail to detecttrains position. The new monitoring system will use these readers and send data fromthe monitoring system via these readers to a database.The aim of this thesis work is to design and build a RFID antenna to send data fromthe monitoring system to the RFID readers. The antenna should be a circularpolarized and it needs to manage the harsh environment on the train.This thesis work started with a theoretical study which investigated four commonantenna types (dipole, loop, PIFA and patch/microstrip) to evaluate which antennatype that is the best solution for this application. It was decided to design a patchantenna from the theoretical study since it fulfils all the requirements for the antenna.Simulations and tests shows that the antenna is circular polarized and have amaximum reading distance of 5 m for 868 MHz. For 2.45 GHz it is linear polarizedand has a reading distance of at least 10 m. With other hardware settings the antennawill have longer reading distance at 2.45 GHz.When all parts of the test bed was finished the test bed was mounted on themeasurement wagon. The final test shows that the antenna fulfils the task. Theantenna transmitted the data from the sensor boxes to the RFID readers.The report suggests future work to minimize the reading distance and size for theantenna. These are: transfer sensor data to RFID tag by “multi hop”, hardwareimprovement for instance antenna diversity and using another substrate (higherdielectric constant).