3-D-Printed All-Dielectric Corner-Like Bragg Reflector for Antenna Gain Enhancement

This letter demonstrates that an inexpensive, easy-to-deploy, and portable 3-D-printed all-dielectric corner-like Bragg reflector can boost antenna gain. Notably, the concept shown here works by placing the reflector around the antenna's near-field without changing its design. The idea behind this work stems from the combination of quarter-wave stack Bragg mirrors and electric image theories, providing further gain enhancements from previous metal corner-like and 3-D-printed Bragg reflectors. In particular, we considered an operating frequency of 5.7 GHz, for which a 3-D-printed prototype was manufactured and characterized at microwave frequencies. As a result, an aperture efficiency of 40.96% with the gain enhanced up to 12.96 dB were observed, without disturbing the primary source impedance bandwidth, in excellent agreement with full-wave numerical analysis.