Additively Manufactured Metamaterial Luneburg Lens for X-band

Abstract

This paper presents the design, simulation and fabrication of metamaterial based Luneburg lens for X-band through additive manufacturing using stereolithography (SLA) technique. SLA offers a fast and cost effective solution for prototyping of dielectric metamaterial structures. It also has better resolution as compared to fused deposition modelling and digital light processing method. A comparison has been drawn between the metamaterial lens and ideal gradient refractive index (GRIN) design for better understanding of lens operation, where it has been found that the non-ideal GRIN profile leads to some performance gaps. The performance of the fabricated structure has been tested at 10 GHz.