Three‐dimensional printed X‐band waveguide variable bends with integrated filters

Abstract

This letter presents compact waveguide variable bends incorporating integrated bandpass filters. Two designs have been demonstrated within X‐band (8.2–12.4 GHz) range, using three‐dimensional stereolithography printing and copper plating. The first design utilizes coupled elliptical resonators, while the second employs coupled deformed ellipsoidal resonators. These designs provide both filtering functionality and complex waveguide routing simultaneously, thereby leading to a reduction of total size and loss. This facilitates the design of compact, low‐loss, and multifunctional integrated subsystems. The measured responses (without any tuning) of both waveguide variable bends exhibit excellent performance, with averaged insertion loss of 0.59 and 0.57 dB, and return loss better than 11.9 and 19.8 dB throughout the passband, respectively. Good agreements between the simulated and measured results of the prototype devices successfully validate the feasibility and practicality of the proposed concept.