Novel Optimized Pyramidal Horn Antenna for UWB Applications

Abstract

In this paper, a novel Pyramidal Horn Antenna for Ultra Wideband(UWB) applications is proposed. The designed horn antenna is fed with a co-axial cable and is backed by the back cavity containing absorber. The proposed structure consists of three main parts: waveguide section, pyramidal flared section and the feeding section. In this, the flaring section is exponentially tapered for a particular rate parameter of 0.050. This type of UWB horn antenna with curved flaring gives a proper and smooth guidance to the incoming travelling waves. This indeed helps in better impedance matching when the wave wholly leaves the antenna. This paper also aims to reduce the spurious back reflections due to the sharp corners of the horn's aperture segment. As a follow up, the sharp corners are replaced by curvy profiles that minimizes the point edge diffraction problem. The effect of having a curvy profile at the end corners of the horn's aperture on the reflection coefficient, gain, directivity, voltage standing wave ratio, etc. is investigated and studied. The designed antenna operates in the allocated ultrawideband spectrum of 3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz. The design is carried out using CST Microwave Studio Suite 17.0 software which follows FDTD method for computation. The simulated results show the gain, VSWR (less than 2) performances maintained without much deviation over the entire spectrum and makes the antenna suitable for UWB applications.