A New Perspective on the Reactive Electromagnetic Energies and Q factors of Antennas

Abstract

It is required to calculate the stored reactive energy of an antenna in order to evaluate its Q factor. Although it has been investigated for a long time, some issues still need further clarification. The main difficulty involved is that the reactive energy of an antenna tends to become infinitely large when integrating the conventionally defined energy density in the whole space outside a small sphere containing the antenna. The reactive energy is usually made to be bounded by subtracting an additional term associated with the radiation fields. However, there exists no well-accepted accurate definition for this additional term that is valid for all cases. By re-checking the definition of reactive energies, an alternative formulation is proposed in this paper which can separate the reactive energy and the radiation energy explicitly based on source-potentials. The clearly defined reactive energy is bounded without necessity to subtract that additional term, and the resultant formulae are easy to implement.

Keywords

• Reactive energy
• electric energy density
• magnetic energy density
• Q factor
• radiation energy