A Design of Broadband 3-D-Printed Circularly Polarized Spherical Luneburg Lens Antenna for X-Band

This letter presents a broadband 3-D-printed circularly polarized (CP) spherical Luneburg lens (LL) with the linearly polarized feed antenna for the X-band. In order to implement spatially continuous varying effective refractive index (RI), the proposed LL is divided to many unit cells and their effective RI is simulated and calculated by effective medium theory. Since the effective RI of unit cells is anisotropic for two orthogonal linearly polarized (LP) waves, the proposed LL is an LP to CP polarizer realized by properly selecting the radius of the LL. The whole structure is fabricated by low cost 3-D-printing (3DP) technic, which is fed by an LP antenna source rotated to a certain angle with respect to the LL around the normal. The measured results indicate that the voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR), axial ratio, and gain enhancement are lower than 2, less than 2.8 dB, and more than 10 dB at X-band, respectively. The results of measurement agree well with the simulation.