Robust Design of 3D-Printed 6–18 GHz Double-Ridged TEM Horn Antenna

Abstract

A robust design of a 3D-printed 6–18 GHz double-ridged TEM horn antenna is proposed in this paper. The designed TEM horn antenna has two parts: an adaptor and a horn aperture. The adaptor is realized using a double-ridged waveguide to extend the operating bandwidth of the dominant mode (TE10 mode). Meanwhile, the horn aperture section is implemented in an exponentially tapered configuration to match the impedance of the double-ridged waveguide with the intrinsic impedance. The performance of the initially designed antenna shows that the reflection coefficient and gain levels are less than −13 dB and greater than 5.5 dBi within the 6–18 GHz band, respectively. The initial design was well done, but the noise factors that may occur during the manufacturing process were not taken into account. To design an antenna considering these noise factors, the parameters of the initial design are optimized by a novel robust design method also proposed in this paper. The robustness of the antenna optimized by the proposed method is approximately 12.4% higher than that of the initial antenna. The validity of the proposed method was tested by fabricating the antenna. A prototype of the optimized antenna with the proposed robust design method is fabricated using a 3D printer with a stereolithographic apparatus attached, and the surface of the frame is covered by a nano-silver plating. The measured results of the fabricated antenna are in good agreement with the simulation results over the operating band. The measured −10 dB reflection coefficient bandwidth of the antenna can cover 6–18 GHz. In addition, the measured gain ranges from 4.42 to 10.75 dBi within the 6–18 GHz band.

Fused deposition modeling for 1 × 2 array of double ridge horn antenna

“…Although FDM is capable of printing various filament polymers, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), and polylactic acid (PLA) are the most commonly used polymers for DRHA printing. [4][5][6][7][8][9] Despite this, there is still a shortage of new literature or reports related to the application of 3D printing in DRHA, and most of them were published within the past 8 years. [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] The comparative characteristics of the study of 3Dprinted DRHA with previous works are listed in Table 1.…”

On Inadequacy of Sequential Design of Experiments for Performance-Driven Surrogate Modeling of Antenna Input Characteristics

“…The high computational cost of such procedures-a result of massive EM analyses required by both local [22] and global [23] search routines, is a serious practical problem. It is even more pronounced for uncertainty quantification procedures, especially robust (tolerance-aware) design [24], [25].…”

Implementation of a Lightweight and Portable Horn Antenna Using 3-D Printing Technology

“…In another study, the gains of horn antennas, which are implemented on a 3D printer using ABS filament, are experimentally investigated for the cases where they are coated with copper, chrome and nickel (Genç et al, 2017). On the other hand, a double-backed horn antenna was implemented in (Lee et al, 2018) to operate in the 6-18 GHz range, printed on a 3D printer, and its performance was measured after coating it with silver-containing conductive paint. It has been shown that this antenna also works as expected.…”