Direct 3-D Printing of Nonplanar Linear-Dipole-Phased Array Antennas

Design and rapid prototyping of a nonplanar lineararray antenna for multimission applications are discussed. The array elements are simple half-wavelength dipoles that were printed uniformly with parallel line and ground plane in a single step. The array antenna was designed for the frequency range of 2.7-3 GHz. A six-element linear-array prototype was fabricated and measured. To achieve higher polarization purity, the elements are mirrored in the array arrangement with respect to the center of the array antenna. With VSWR <; 1 over the entire frequency range, the proposed linear array obtains -30 dB cross-polarization level in scanning up to ±45° in the principal plane. The light weight, low cost, and high performance of the proposed array antenna demonstrate the strong potential of three-dimensional printing technology for multimission applications.