A high efficiency, electrically-small, 3-D machined-substrate antenna fabricated with fused deposition modeling and 3-D printing

This paper presents a high efficiency, electrically-small, light-weight, 3-D machined-substrate antenna. The antenna is a half-wave dipole conformed into a cubical shape and has an integrated parallel plate balun for the feed. The operational frequency is 2.4 GHz and the measured 10 dB return loss bandwidth and gain are 3.6% and 1.5 dBi, respectively. The antenna fits in a sphere of radius λ/10.5 and weighs 0.5 g. The antenna substrate is built of Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene plus material using the fused deposition process and then metalized using the direct print additive manufacturing processed Dupont CB-028 silver ink. The performance is compared to a previous prototype made with printed circuit board technology and other 3-D antenna designs from the literature.