Wideband 3D Printed Conformal Dielectric Antenna with End-fire Radiation

In this paper, a conformal 3D-printed endfire dielectric antenna with wideband performance is proposed. The device contains a multi-section dielectric block that is designed with stepped permittivities to attain a wide bandwidth. Through altering the infill percentage during 3D printing, the effective relative permittivity of dielectric segments can be precisely controlled in the range of 8.5 to 2.5. The antenna can be printed to be conformal to a curved metal ground plane to obtain an end-fire radiation beam with a reduced tilt angle. Measured results confirm a wide impedance bandwidth of 67.4% from 6.2 to 12.5 GHz, a stable end-fire beam and a realized gain above 7 dBi over the whole operation band.