Abstract
Reflectarray antennas have attracted extensive attention due to their low loss, high gain, compact volume, and their excellent abilities to control the radiated beam. The use of dielectric resonators as the reflectarray elements minimises the ohmic loss and the coupling between elements. This study uses fused deposition modelling (FDM) three-dimensional (3D) printing rapidly prototyping a low cost and light-weight dielectric resonator reflectarray. The demonstrated reflectarray is composed of 625 3D printed dielectric resonator elements to control the reflected phase over the reflector surface. The total size is 12 × 12 cm2 and the mass is 67 g. Measurements show that this reflectarray provides 28 dBi gain at 30 GHz when offset fed by a Ka-band horn antenna. This work demonstrates the potential of FDM for millimetre wave (mm-wave) applications. The new 3D printing approach can be deployed for high-gain mm-wave antenna fabrication with significantly reduced labour time and material costs.
Highlights
Reflectarrays are able to reflect the waves that are transmitted from a feed source into a planar phase wavefront at a desired angle and vice versa
Reflectarrays do not have the complex and lossy feed network when compared with phased arrays and have numerous advantages, including their low cost, small size and weight, and low profile when compared with traditional parabolic reflectors [1, 2]
The individual element is similar to dielectric resonator antennas (DRA) that provides the benefits of lower loss, relatively wider bandwidth, higher efficiency, and smaller mutual coupling between elements [8, 9]
Summary
Reflectarrays are able to reflect the waves that are transmitted from a feed source into a planar phase wavefront at a desired angle and vice versa. There are two ways to realise the dielectric array elements depending on the material availability and the fabrication technique: (i) use one dielectric slab with locally varied effective permittivity for the phase control; and (ii) use dielectric resonators with various dimensions for tuning the local reflected phase The former approach has been reported in [6, 7], and the reflectarrays are similar to the perforated or grooved Fresnel zone plate reflectors. The composite ABS material has been used in this work, and a light-weight dielectric resonator reflectarray that produces a high-gain collimated beam in the boresight direction from an offset feed has been 3D printed. To the author's best knowledge, this is the first to report the use of FDM to fabricate periodical array structures up to Ka-band This new approach minimises the material usage and processing time for high-gain antenna applications.
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