Additive manufacturing substrate for patch antenna using variable infill Poly Lactic acid

Abstract

A low dielectric constant substrate for patch antenna using additive manufacturing air gap technique is prepared. This work can tune the desirable value of the dielectric constant and loss tangent of patch substrate by optimizing the various factors involved in 3D printing. The prototype is based on PLA Pro + filament to check the variation in dielectric constant and loss tangent. The performance of the 3D printer used has also been examined for the proposed substrate. This technique helps to create low dielectric constant materials for the high-frequency range of operation of RF communication devices. The prototype's experimental results demonstrate that the 80% Linearly infilled sample (L-80) outperforms the 100% Linearly infilled sample (L-100) in terms of average loss tangent, which has improved by 45.07% on average from 8.5 to 12.5 GHz. At higher frequency ranges of 10.86 to 12.5 GHz, the dielectric constant of the L-80 sample outperforms the L-100 sample in terms of a lower desirable dielectric constant (εr) range (2.0≤εr≤2.2). The dielectric constant results for the above frequency range show that the L-80 sample is 3 to 5 times better than L-100. The average improvement in the dielectric constant for 8.5 to 9.0 GHz is nearly 31.84%.