Design and prototype manufacturing of a feed system for Ku-band satellite communication by using 3D FDM/PLA printing and conductive paint technology

摘要

In this study, the realization of a Ku-band feed system for reflector antenna insatellite communication systems is presented using 3D printing and conductivepaint methods. The system includes a corrugated conical horn antennadesigned to operate at 10.5 to 18.5 GHz and an H-plane waveguide diplexer tooperate at 10.7 to 12.75 GHz and 17.3 to 18.4 GHz in receive (RX) and transmit(TX) bands, respectively. In the manufacturing of the structures, fused depositionmodeling (FDM) technology and polylactic acid material are processed for3D printing, where nickel and silver conductive-based paints are used for coatingpurpose. The measurement results of the feed system are found to be ingood agreement with simulations that the combined (nickel-coated antennaand silver-coated diplexer) structure has return loss of more than 10 dB andhigh gain performance of 12 to 17 dBi within the RX and TX bands of 10.7 to12.75 GHz and 17.4 to 18.8 GHz, respectively; while rejection (isolation) levelbetween TX and RX ports is higher than 60 dB. The complex structure containingseveral detailed shapes inside shows that this low-cost production techniqueas compared to high-cost CNC-based metallic production technologycan be used for the prototype structures or proof-of-concept type studies of Kubandsystems.