Fully integrated design of a probe‐fed open‐ended waveguide filtering antenna using 3‐D printing technology

Abstract

This article presents a fully integrated design of probe-fed open-ended waveguide filtering antenna by adopting 3-D printing technology. As for the conventional processing technologies such as computer numerical control machining, they usually suffer from mutually separated parts and inquire post-processing assembly in the fabrication of complex waveguide structure. Compared with them, the 3-D printing technology can provide possibility to directly form an all-in-one architecture after reasonable design to avoid unexpected concave, thus eliminating the error caused by assembly as can as possible. In this article, the aforementioned manufacture strategy has been successfully applied to waveguide filtering antenna. By adopting a tilted setting in selective laser melting process that is a kind of 3-D printing technologies, the proposed waveguide antenna with internal structure can be fabricated without flaw and extra supporter. The probe-fed waveguide antenna is designed herein by reforming the first- and last-order cavities of a waveguide-fed metal-insert filter to achieve similar filtering characteristics. This design offers a feasible example of all-in-one waveguide filtering antenna and can be extended to other waveguide components.