A high efficiency, electrically-small, 3-D machined-substrate antenna fabricated with fused deposition modeling and 3-D printing

Author

Nassar, Ibrahim T. ; Tsang, H. ; Church, Kenneth ; Weller, Thomas M.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng., Univ. of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

fYear

2014

fDate

19-23 Jan. 2014

Firstpage

67

Lastpage

69

Abstract

This paper presents a high efficiency, electrically-small, light-weight, 3-D machined-substrate antenna. The antenna is a half-wave dipole conformed into a cubical shape and has an integrated parallel plate balun for the feed. The operational frequency is 2.4 GHz and the measured 10 dB return loss bandwidth and gain are 3.6% and 1.5 dBi, respectively. The antenna fits in a sphere of radius λ/10.5 and weighs 0.5 g. The antenna substrate is built of Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene plus material using the fused deposition process and then metalized using the direct print additive manufacturing processed Dupont CB-028 silver ink. The performance is compared to a previous prototype made with printed circuit board technology and other 3-D antenna designs from the literature.

Keywords

antennas; baluns; rapid prototyping (industrial); three-dimensional printing; 3D antenna designs; 3D machined-substrate antenna fabricated; 3D printing; Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene; Dupont CB-028 silver ink; cubical shape; direct print additive manufacturing processed; frequency 2.4 GHz; fused deposition modeling; half-wave dipole; integrated parallel plate balun; loss 10 dB; printed circuit board technology; Antenna measurements; Dipole antennas; Helical antennas; Materials; Printing; Wireless sensor networks; 3-D antennas; 3-D printing; Additive manufacturing; Fused Deposition; electrically small antennas; wireless sensor networks (WSNs);

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Radio and Wireless Symposium (RWS), 2014 IEEE

Conference_Location

Newport Beach, CA

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-2298-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/RWS.2014.6830137

Filename

6830137