Evaluating conductive paint performance on 3-D printed horn antennas

This paper presents the performance of pyramidal horn antennas operating at X-band (8–12 GHz) that have been metallized with low cost conductive paint. The pyramidal horns are based on a WR-90 waveguide standard gain horn (SGH) designed for 15 dBi gain that have been manufactured by fused deposition modeling 3-D printing. They are then metalized using conductive copper paint. The antenna gain and radiation patterns are compared for antennas with three different paint thicknesses. A full-wave electromagnetic simulator, ANSYS HFSS, is used to simulate the horns and compare with measurement. We observe that the thickness of the conductive paint impacts the antenna 3dB beamwidth and gain.