Design and Simulation of Slotted Waveguide Antenna Array for X-Band Radars

Modern radars are widely employed in the field of defence, civil application and communication for target detection, tracking and ranging. Such radars are commonly designed to operate in X-band. The performance of the antenna must not degrade due to extreme changes in temperature and pressure. One such antenna that can fulfil these requirements is the slotted waveguide antenna. It consists of array of rectangular slots milled on the surface of the waveguide which enables the electromagnetic waves to radiate through these slots. A slotted waveguide antenna array is designed and simulated using HFSS for a frequency of 10.5GHz. The simulated design of slotted waveguide antenna array offers a return loss of -32.685dB and a VSWR of 1.016. The antenna exhibits a gain of 15.378dB and a peak gain of 35.245dB. It is horizontally polarized with a bandwidth percentage of 9%. Also, the dimension of the slots is varied, and an analysis of their effect is made on various antenna parameters.