Fully 3D-Printed Lightweight Combination of a Circularly Polarized Transmitarray and a Feed Horn

The growing demand for high gain and beam steerable antennas onboard small satellites has motivated research on lightweight antenna technologies. We present a lightweight transmitarray antenna system including a 19-GHz, circularly polarized (CP), three-layer transmitarray, and a K-band CP feed horn with a built-in septum polarizer. Both the transmitarray and the horn are fully 3D-printed using the novel charge-programmed multi-material 3D printing process. The total weight of the printed horn and the 12-cm diameter transmitarray is only 17 g, which is about an order of magnitude lower than a conventional transmitarray system of this size in K-band. The transmitarray uses the horn as feed and achieves a measured directivity of 24.1 dB at 19 GHz, corresponding to 45.1% aperture efficiency.