Additive manufacturing on Kapton substrate for rapid prototyping of low-cost mmWave antennas

This work investigated the potential of aerosol jet printing for rapid prototyping of millimeter-wave antennas. Traditionally, antenna design and production require extensive simulation and multiple prototyping stages to achieve the desired radiation pattern and bandwidth performance, with each iteration incurring material costs. In this work, a commercial aerosol jet printer, as a direct write additive manufacturing tool, was used to create antenna arrays on Rogers substrate and Kapton tape. A 9-element series-fed patch array with amplitude tapering based on the Dolph-Chebyshev method was designed. The antennas were tested at 46 GHz and compared to PCB etched antennas. The results showed good agreement in return loss and radiation pattern performance between the printed and etched antennas. Based on these findings, we conclude that aerosol jet printing on Kapton is an effective method for rapidly prototyping test antennas, while the reuse of substrates minimizes material waste and production costs, offering a sustainable and efficient solution for future antenna development.