Design and Implementation of a Dielectric Rod Using 3D Printing for Antenna Gain Optimization

This paper reports the design and manufacture of 3D-printed rod antenna for wireless communications in satellite applications. The design consists of an external dielectric rod, fed by a circular waveguide featuring an internal multi-section stepped impedance transformer. The results from modeling and simulation of the 3D printed dielectric rod are presented for gain enhancement. The dielectric rod is additively manufactured using conventional polylactic acid (PLA) as polymer for fused filament fabrication (FFF) with an optimized infill density of 50 %, in order to control the relative permittivity, dielectric loss and optimize the gain within required bandwidth. The performance of rod antenna is validated by a good agreement between simulated and measured results. The dielectric rod antenna achieves a bandwidth from 10 GHz to 13 GHz with a maximum gain of 15.6 dBi.