Three‐dimensional printed wideband, dual‐cavity Ku‐band antenna

Abstract

A novel three‐dimensional (3D) printed, wideband, and low cost bull's eye antenna is proposed and designed for Ku‐band applications. The proposed antenna covers entire Ku‐band satellite communication bands starting from 10.5 GHz to 14.5 GHz. The antenna structure consists of dual‐cavity radiating aperture surrounded by a circular groove. With the addition of cavity and corrugation, the antenna gain is increased more than 6 dB. The antenna is fabricated using 3D printing technology and conductive painting. Measurement results indicate that the antenna has 72% fractional bandwidth from 8 GHz to 17 GHz. Measured antenna peak gain is 13.5 dBi at 13 GHz and no less than 11.5 dBi throughout the entire Ku band.

Cost-effective experiments with additively manufactured waveguide and cavities in the S-band

“…The main disadvantages of conductive tape metallization are moderate conductivity and surface roughness. The conductivity of nickel aerosol coating is reported as ∼2.4 × 10 4 S m −1 in [12] and that of silver plating is ∼10 5 , given in [14], while we measured the same parameter as ∼2 × 10 4 S m −1 . This level of conductivity allows us to obtain desired parameters accurately from dielectric measurements and accelerator cavity prototyping, which could be an indication that neither the thickness of the coating nor the roughness of the cavity wall surfaces affects the precision of the selected experiments significantly.…”

“…Since producing metallic structures via a 3D printer is a considerably expensive procedure, recent studies in this area have focused on metalizing dielectric materials and various methods have been proposed in the literature. Accordingly, nickel [12,13], silver [14,15], gold coating [16] and electroplating [17] are encountered in engineering applications. One of the main problems here is that although the primary purpose is to reduce the budget of the final structure, the coating materials and sprays containing expensive elements such as nickel, silver, and gold are not satisfactorily low-cost.…”

“…In terms of cost comparison, silver and gold plating methods are more expensive than nickel plating, while the conductive tape covering is drastically less costly than the other methods [12,14]. The aerosol coating techniques have a drying time of approximately 24 h. In the metalization process with conductive tape, the coating process generally finishes at the order of minutes or a few hours, depending on the geometrical complexity of the structure.…”

Miniaturized Wideband Antenna Prototype Operating over the Ku-Band

“…This is unlocking new applications where there is a need for a complex geometrical structure, which was previously impossible. A plastic body of the antenna was designed through 3D printing techniques and later coated with commercially available spray coating [ 20 , 21 , 22 ], which showed the improvement of the antenna gain. Similarly, a 3D-printed structure that utilized diverse infill ratios was proposed in [ 23 ], which was able to show improved directive radiation characteristics.…”

A novel lens antenna with wide beamwidth using three dimensional printing

“…A dielectric rod antennas based on three printing technology is proposed in Reference 20, the proposed structure only requires one dielectric material, that performance is similar to the traditional multilayer rod antenna. In Reference 21, a wideband, dual‐cavity Ku‐band antenna has been fabricated using conductive painting and three‐dimensional printing technology. A multilayered cylindrical dielectric lens antenna using three‐dimensional printing technology has been proposed in Reference 22.…”