Modular Design for a Stacked SIW Antenna Array at Ka-Band

Modular Design for a Stacked SIW Antenna Array at Ka-Band

Blog Article

This article presents a modular substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) antenna array based on H-plane aperture structures for Ka-band.The unitary antenna is based on a SIW aperture antenna with an improved H-plane radiation pattern by means of the implementation of metallic vias in the wave propagation along the H-plane antenna.The inner metallic vias are introduced to form four different sub-apertures at the end of the Fenders H-plane aperture antenna, dividing the field from the feeding into four in-phase wavefronts.In that manner, a flatter wavefront is generated to achieve high directivity.Additionally, some periodic parallel strips are printed at the end of the antenna aperture to improve the impedance matching with the air.

The H-plane antenna is used as the constituting element for an E-plane array antenna, using four H-plane elements.The E-plane array antenna increases the antenna directivity, providing a pencil-shape beam, based on a series coaxial feeding structure.This feeding strategy favours the antenna modularity at the expense of suffering from a slight beam steering with frequency in the working bandwidth.The proposed antenna has an impedance matching below -10 dB from 32.9 to 37.

0 GHz (equivalent to 11.73% bandwidth) with a nearly stable gain of almost 10 dBi for the H-plane unitary element and 14 dBi for the E-plane array.Prototypes of both antennas are manufactured to validate the Knife Sharpener proposed unitary antenna and array designs.