Engineering Commons^™

Direct Digital Manufacturing Of Multi-Layer Wideband Ku-Band Patch Antennas, Merve Kacar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Design and performance of fully-printed Ku-band aperture coupled patch antennas fabricated by a direct digital manufacturing (DDM) approach that integrates fused deposition modeling (FDM) of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) thermoplastic with in-situ micro-dispensing of conductive silver paste (CB028) are reported. Microstrip line characterizations are performed and demonstrate that misalignment of ABS substrate deposition direction with microstrip line micro-dispensing direction can degrade the effective conductivity up to 60% within the Ku-band, and must be taken into consideration in antenna array feed network designs. Specically, over 125 µm thick ABS substrate, RF loss of 0.052 dB/mm is obtained at 18 GHz, demonstrating …

High Performance Digitally Manufactured Microwave And Millimeter-Wave Circuits And Antennas, Eduardo A. Rojas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The potential of Additive Manufacturing (AM) for microwave and mm-wave applications is increasingly being revealed thanks to recent advancements in research. AM empowers engineers with new capabilities to manufacture complex conformal geometries quicker and at lower costs. It allows, for instance, the embedding of RF front ends into functional structures. In this dissertation, two aspects of AM are explored: (a) The development and characterization of techniques that improve the performance of AM microwave circuits and antennas, and (b) study of complex geometries, such as meshed structures, as an alternative to reduce material usage, cost, and weight of the components.

Micro-dispensing …