Hello everyone,

I'm currently running simulations of a patch antenna with CST Studio Suite, and i'm varying the thickness of the metallic patch in order to find out it's influence on the radiation efficiency of the device. Until now, all my simulations result in very small variations of the radiation efficiency whatever the patch thickness that i use, which ranges from 1/8 to 3 times the theoretical skin depth at the frequency of interest. However, i'm quite sure that i should see significant differences, that lead me to conclude i'm probably not modelling the metallic materials the good way. Up to now, i tried to define the metals as "lossy metals", "thin panel" and "Tabulated Surface Impedance" with a slighlty light meshing. The three different definitions lead to similar results. Then, i did try to reinforce the mesh density, but it is quite hard since i have to work with tetrahedral meshing (Frequency Domaine Solver) whose number of nodes litteraly blows up when trying increase the mesh density along the thickness of the metal.

Would someone know how to take into account the thickness of the metallic parts without increasing to much the mesh/time cost of the simulation ?