Aerosol jet printing on Kapton for affordable millimeter wave antenna prototyping

In this work, we have examined the feasibility of 3D printed antennas on Kapton for mm-wave applications. Initially, a series-fed patch antenna array at 47 GHz was designed and fabricated on a low-loss Rogers substrate. Subsequently, aerosol jet printing was employed to prototype the antenna on Kapton film, which was adhered to the Rogers substrate. Experimental results showed that the Kapton antenna demonstrated similar performance to the copper etched Rogers antenna. Therefore, this method can be adopted for prototyping high-frequency antennas on expensive low-loss substrates, enabling rapid prototyping and allowing the substrates to be reused by peeling off the Kapton films.