Gain Enhancement of Horn Antenna Using a Metal Lens

作者：Zhang, Zhi-Yi; Lu, Kai; Leung, Kwok Wa^*

来源：IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, 2023, 71(2): 1337-1349.

DOI：10.1109/TAP.2022.3228631

• 3-D printing
• compact
• high aperture efficiency
• high gain
• horn antenna
• metal lens
• phase correction
• wideband

A compact wideband open-horn antenna is proposed for point-to-point wireless communications. The antenna consists of a spatial power divider and an H-plane lens. Both the power divider and lens are metallic, fabricated by using 3-D-printing technology. Our proposed lens has wrinkled subchannels of different lengths to convert the original quasi-cylindrical wavefront into a nearly planar wavefront across a wide frequency range, giving a wideband high-gain antenna. The operating principle and the design guideline are given. Using the guideline, two design examples with different E-field magnitude distributions are studied and fabricated for Ku-band applications. The first design has a uniform E-field magnitude distribution, with its maximum measured gain and normalized sidelobe level (SLL) being 18.1 dBi and -9.4 dB, respectively. The second design has a tapered E-field magnitude distribution. In this case, the maximum measured gain and normalized SLL are 19.6 dBi and -15.0 dB, respectively. The overall measured 3-dB gain bandwidths of the two designs are more than 46.7%. It is found that the sizes (axial lengths) of the proposed designs are smaller than those of optimum horn antennas by more than 60%.

• 单位
  中山大学