Design and realization of dual band stacked antenna via three-dimensional printing technology

Abstract

With the ever-increasing demands for high-performancewireless communication systems, the need of fast andlow-cost realization of antenna stages had also becomemore crucial for wireless communication industry.Herein, design and low-cost realization of a three-dimensional (3D) printed dual band Stacked Micro-strip Patch Array (SMPA) antenna has been studied. A3D electromagnetic-based simulation model of the pro-posed SMPA antenna has been created in CST Micro-wave Studio. The antenna achieves a simulated gainlevel of almost 8.3 dBi at 5.2 and 10.4 GHz frequen-cies. Then, the antenna design with optimally selectedparameters has been prototyped via the use of 3Dprinting technology. The prototyped antenna has ameasured gain level of 7.2 dBi at the operation fre-quencies. Furthermore, the experimental results of theprototyped antenna have been compared with the sim-ulated results. From the compared results, it can beconcluded that not only the proposed antenna designhas achieved high-performance measures comparedwith counterpart designs in the literature but also it ispossible to achieve an accurate, fast, and low-cost real-ization via the use of 3D printing technology