Millimeter-Wave Magneto-Electric Dipole Antenna Array With a Self-Supporting Geometry for Time-Saving Metallic 3-D Printing

A specially designed millimeter-wave high-gain wideband magneto-electric (ME) dipole antenna array based on metallic 3-D printing technology is presented. In order to shorten the printing duration of the array that is related to the fabrication costs, components with novel self-supporting geometries in the printing process, including a waveguide-fed ME-dipole radiating element, a 1-to-4 power divider acting as the subarray feed, and a full-corporate E-plane waveguide feed network, are investigated. Benefitted from these components, the entire array configuration can be fulfilled by employing a time-saving printing scheme, which leads to a 15% reduction in the printing duration for an $8 \times 8$ array, and the reduction can be further increased to 40% for a $16 \times 16$ design in comparison with the reported 3-D printed Ka-band arrays with same sizes that were fabricated by using the traditional printing scheme. Simultaneously, excellent operating characteristics, including a wide bandwidth of 32.4%, a maximum gain of 27.1 dBi, and stable unidirectional radiation, are also confirmed experimentally by an $8 \times 8$ prototype of the proposed array. This work offers a method to effectively reduce the printing time of the 3-D printed large-size antenna arrays with attractive performance, which would be of importance to the practical cost-effective large-scale applications in the emerging millimeter-wave wireless communications.