Aerosol Jet printed 24 GHz end-fire quasi-Yagi-Uda antenna on a 3-D printed cavity substrate

This paper presents an Aerosol Jet printed end-fire antenna operating at 24 GHz on a 3-D printed substrate for the first time. A compact quasi-Yagi-Uda antenna is chosen to achieve end-fire radiation pattern, and is optimized to be directly fed by a 50 Ω microstrip transmission line (MTL) with a balun. The partially metalized substrate serves as the ground plane for the mcirostrip line as well as the reflector for the quasi-Yagi-Uda antenna. Additionally, a cavity is integrated in the back of the substrate to provide low loss, high gain and good efficiency. The simulated performance shows 26.4 dB return loss at 24 GHz, 3.32 dBi of peak gain and 57.7% radiation efficiency. The measurements are carried out over a frequency range of 20 – 30 GHz with the return loss of 14.6 dB at 25.8 GHz. The combination of Aerosol Jet printing and 3-D Polyjet printing processes in this paper demonstrates a good advantage of additive manufacturing technology, which allows for highly efficient fabrication of low-profile antennas and other novel RF circuits.