International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE) Vol. 8, No. 3, June 2018, pp. 1611~1617 ISSN: 2088-8708, DOI: 10.11591/ijece.v8i3.pp1611-1617  1611 Journal homepage: http://iaescore.com/journals/index.php/IJECE Effect of the Thickness of High Tc Superconducting Rectangular Microstrip Patch Over Ground Plane with Rectangular Aperture Nabil Boukhennoufa 1 , Lotfi Djouane 2 , Houcine Oudira 3 , Mounir Amir 4 , Tarek Fortaki 5 1,2,3 Department of Electronics, University of Mohamed Boudiaf, M‟sila, Algeria 1,2,3 Laboratory of Electrical Engineering, University of Mohamed Boudiaf, M‟sila, Algeria 4 Scientific and Technical Research Center in Welding and Control, Algiers, Algeria 5 Department of Electronics, University of Mostefa Ben Boulaid, Batna, Algeria Article Info ABSTRACT Article history: Received Jan 29, 2018 Revised Apr 12, 2018 Accepted Apr 18, 2018 In recent years, a great interest has been observed in the development and use of new materials in microwave technology. Particularly, a special interest has been observed in the use of superconducting materials in microwave integrated circuits, this is due to their main characteristics. In this paper, the complex resonant frequency problem of a superconductor patch over Ground Plane with Rectangular Aperture is formulated in terms of an integral equation, the kernel of which is the dyadic Green‟s function. Galerkin‟s procedure is used in the resolution of the electric field integral equation. The surface impedance of the superconductor film is modeled using the two fluids model of Gorter and Casimir. Numerical results concerning the effect of the thickness of the superconductor patch on the characteristics of the antenna are presented. Keyword: Full-wave analysis High Tc superconducting Microstrip patch Rectangular aperture Copyright © 2018 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved. Corresponding Author: Nabil Boukhennoufa, Department of Electronics, Laboratory of Electrical Engineering, University of Mohamed Boudiaf, M‟sila, BP 166 M'sila 28000, Algeria. Email: boukhennoufa.nabil@gmail.com 1. INTRODUCTION Microwave passive devices such as resonators, filters and antennas are one of the main applications of the high TC superconducting (HTS) materials. They show superior performance and characteristics to the normal metal devices, such as: the power losses are low, reduction of attenuation and noise level, besides the propagation time of signals in the circuit can be greatly reduced [1]-[6]. This allows to be used in several applications such as mobile communications, radars and filters [7]-[10]. The study of the resonant characteristics of High Tc superconducting microstrip antennas has been first studied by [4] using the cavity model. Since the cavity model does not consider rigorously the effects of surface waves and fringing fields at the edge of the patch. Recently; Silva has studied the resonant characteristics of High Tc superconducting microstrip antennas using the full-wave analysis [11], [12]. It is noted that in the above works, the effect of thin superconducting patch was not studied. In this paper, the effect of thin superconducting patch loading on the resonant frequency and bandwidth of rectangular microstrip structures illustrated in Figure 1 is investigated. The complex resonant frequency problem considered here is formulated in terms of an integral equation using vector Fourier transforms [13]. The surface impedance of the superconductor film is modeled using the two fluids model of Gorter and Casimir [5], [11], [14]. The paper is organized as follows. First, the integral equation for the unknown patch currents is formulated. The derivation is performed in the Fourier transform domain and