An Additive 3D-Printed Hemispherical Lens with Flower-shaped Stub Slot Ultra-Wideband Antenna for High-Gain Radiation

This paper presents a 3D-printed hemispherical lens integrated with a planar ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna. The flower-shaped stub slot UWB antenna is made of 0.8-mm FR-4. The operating frequency of the UWB covers 3.10 GHz - 11.6 GHz with a nominal gain at zero degrees of 1.74 dBi. To enhance the UWB antenna’s high-gain radiation, a 3D-printed additive hemispherical lens is designed and fabricated from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). The electrical properties, i.e., relative permittivity and loss tangent, of ABS are 2.66, and 0.003, respectively. Four different lens radii (8 mm, 10 mm, 12 mm, and 14 mm) are chosen to investigate the gain of the antenna. In all four cases, the 3D-printed lens is fixed in place in front of the UWB antenna with an optimum gap of 3 mm chosen to reduce the wave reflection between the lens and source antenna. Based on the measurement results, the reflection coefficient, S11, of four conditions still covers the UWB frequency range. The nominal gain at zero-degree values for lens radii of 8 mm, 10 mm, 12 mm, and 14 mm are 3.43 dBi, 4.22 dBi, 4.73 dBi, and 5.18 dBi, respectively. The proposed additive 3D-printed dielectric lens antenna also offers many advantages, i.e., ease of design and assembly, low-cost fabrication, and size reduction for high-gain antennas. Furthermore, the high-gain antenna provides a narrow half power beamwidth, which can be implemented to increase the resolution of the imaging system.