A 3D Printed 2x2 Circular Planar Antenna Array for Wireless Communications Applications

Abstract

In this work, a 3D printed 2  2 circular planar antenna array was designed to explain the usability of 3DP technique for RF systems. An innovative process with etching substrate in PLA dielectric is implemented. The designed planar array antenna consists of four circular antenna elements combined with power divider on the top layer of PLA substrate and the ground plane is mounted on the bottom layer of substrate, both the patch and the ground are made of red copper sheet with a thickness of 1 mm and an overall size of 133.14  146.5  2 mm 3 . The proposed array used PLA substrate material with relative permittivity of 3.1 and loss tangent of 0.001, and all parts of the antenna are fixed by screw nails. The novel circular planar antenna array operates with one input feeding by a coaxial connector connected directly to transmission line, which is merged with the designed power divider, the final power divider consists of two sections combined together and simulated individually to investigate their performance through the reflection coefficient and isolation between ports. The 3D printed circular planar array is simulated and the obtained results, such as S11 reached up to -15.69 dB at 2.63 GHz and the total gain of 6.73 dBi, are obtained at the achieved band, and also other bands are generated which confirms the suitability of the proposed array for various wireless applications.

A Band Stop to Band Pass Filter Transformation Utilizing 3-D Printing Technique for C-band Applications

“…3D printing techniques are used recently in designing microwave components such as filters and antennas. It can be used to construct antenna models for multiband applications as in [16][17][18][19]. Additionally, there are various designs of microwave filters based on 3D printing in the RF frequency range [20][21], and the implemented BPF in [22] was operated in the E-band (60-90 GHz) of the millimetric wave frequency range, but with inconsistent simulation and experimental results due to fabrication tolerance.…”