报告时间：2025.07.26 16：00-16：30
地点：抖音黑料
东校区包玉书7号楼210
报告详情
3D-Printed Millimetre-Wave Waveguide Passive Devices and Antennas
Professor Yi Wang
Over the last decade or so, 3D printing technique has transformed itself from a novelty to antenna community into an essential and widely utilized tool for many research laboratories, design houses and manufacture companies. Its nearly net-shaping capability renders new manufacturing routes for complex lens structures, high-performance horn antennas and even convoluted waveguide arrays. Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM), Stereolithography (SLA) and Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) are among the increasingly diversified additive manufacturing techniques that have been used to manufacture antennas. FDM is the most low-cost printing technique and offers the lowest manufacturing accuracy and surface finish. However, this technique has found a lot of applications in dielectric type of antennas for its flexibility with materials. SLA offers the best surface quality and dimensional accuracy among the three and has been utilised to manufacture some complex waveguide structures with fine features. LPBF, often known as Selective Laser Meting (SLM), gives us the high-performance metal antenna structures when robustness, mechanical strength and thermal stability are the desired properties. All three types of printers are now widely available. High-precision printing techniques that offer manufacture tolerance of 20 um or under, however, are much less accessible and the printers are rare. The two-photon polymerisation and the Projection Micro Stereolithography (PµSL) are two example precision polymer printing techniques that have been utilised to produce antennas with fine features around tens of micrometres and overall size on the centimetre scale. Micro laser sintering is one of the very few metal precision techniques that have been used for antenna manufacture.
In this talk, we will first provide a brief overview of the application of 3D printing in metal passive devices and antennas (e.g. metal lens, waveguides and horns). We will use several examples to show the capabilities of various printing techniques and different printers. Among them are: a dual-polarised waveguide array with orthomode transducers (OMTs) by SLA printing and copper plating; a W-band corrugated horn with integrated septum polariser by micro laser sintering (MSL), a precision LPBF based technique; and a 355 GHz multibeam metal lens antenna by the Projection Micro Stereolithography (PµSL), a precision SLA technique. All are printed either monolithically or with much reduced assembly need. We will also discuss the importance of the end-to-end process, i.e. printing-polishing-plating (PPP), in manufacturing microwave and mm-wave antennas.
