Use of 3D Printing for Horn Antenna Manufacturing

Abstract

This article describes the manufacturing of a horn antenna using a 3D commercial printer. The horn antenna was chosen for its simplicity and practical versatility. The standardised horn antenna is one of the most widely used antennas in microwave technology. A standardised horn antenna can be connected to standardised waveguides. The horn antenna has been selected so that this antenna can be fabricated by 3D printing and thus obtain the equivalent of a standardised horn antenna. This 3D horn antenna can then be excited by a standardised waveguide. The 3Dprinted horn antenna with metallic layers has very good impedance characteristics, standing wave ratio and radiation patterns that are close to those of a standardised horn antenna. The 3D-based horn antenna is suitable for applications where low antenna weight is required, such as aerospace and satellite technologies. The article also describes a manufacturing procedure for a horn antenna (E-sector horn antenna) that is plated with galvanic layers of silver and gold. The design of the plated horn antenna in the Matlab application using the Antenna Toolbox extension is also described, including 3D printing procedures, post-processing procedures (plating) and practical testing of its functionality. The measured results are compared to simulations of the standardised horn antenna and then analysed.

An Automated Approach to Horn Antenna Impedance Matching and Manufacturing Using 3D Printing

“…Among the recent works that we were able to find, the most pertinent reference to our work would be the one in [19], because it also used 3D printing of a model of horn antenna, albeit their horn was not a pyramidal horn, but an E-sector horn antenna. Regrettably, even though they utilized more expensive techniques to process the printed surface, such as the 3D print quality of 0.1 mm, galvanic plating using silver and 24-carat gold and using a microscopic inspection of the surface smoothness, we could find any particular value of gain, SWR and impedance bandwidth reported in the results of [19], while the radiation pattern and the denoted HPBW of the same cut-plane differed in the two subsequent figures. Apart from that, a comparison to some other references is here summarized in Table VI.…”

“…Likewise, a design of a Chebyshev multi-section broadband coaxial-to-waveguide adapter was proposed in [18] for the THz regime, with 0.02mm precision of fabrication but due to a multi-section design that increases the length, it would not be practical enough for an implementation with 3D printing at the S-frequency band. A recent publication that we found addressing fabrication of a horn antenna by means of additive manufacturing [19] did not, however, address a design of a horn with an integrated adapter and it also did not include an algorithm for a custom antenna design and optimization, but merely adopted the specifications of one commercial horn antenna just to test the feasibility of 3D printing for a horn antenna.…”

A Novel Approach to the Production of Printed Patch Antennas

“…The worldwide expansion of 3D printing is enhanced by the specific demands of the final consumers. 3D printing is a process of creating a three-dimensional solid object from a digital file, in which the resulting printed object is gradually created by applying (printing) continuous layers of material [1][2][3][4]. Today, there are many 3D printer manufacturers around the world who are engaged in the development and production of various types of 3D printers.…”

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Planar and Waveguide 3D-Printed Antennas Manufactured Using Dielectric and Conductive Filaments

“…Consequently, FFF-based techniques, or other 3Dprinting methods based on material extrusion, are mainly used in the literature to manufacture the dielectric structure/support of the antenna, resorting to alternative solutions to suitably create its conductive parts [11]- [26]. Specifically, four main approaches can be used: 1) conductive tape (usually copper or aluminum) [11]- [13]; 2) conductive paint (or similarly spray coating or conductive ink) [13]- [19]; 3) galvanic plating [5], [13], [20]- [24]; 4) conductive filament [13], [25], [26].…”