3-D-Printed Spiral Leaky Wave Antenna With Circular Polarization

Abstract

This article presents the design, manufacturing and measurement of a fully dielectric leaky wave antenna operating at 18 GHz. The antenna is composed of a grounded dielectric substrate with a top dielectric Archimedean spiral corrugation, which allows obtaining a directive pencil-beam in broadside direction with circular polarization depending on the turning sense of the spiral. The 3D-printing implementation allows having two new degrees of freedom for the spiral when compared to other previous implementations based on metals, which are the relative permittivity and the height of the spiral. A study about the effect of these two parameters is presented and one proposed antenna is manufactured using low-loss and low-cost ABS filaments. Measurement results show good agreement with simulations, validating the implementation of this kind of antennas using low-cost 3D-printing.