PLA-based 3D Printed Quad-ridged Horn Antenna for Tomography Application

In order to improve the accuracy of object detection tomography application requires a wideband antenna and dual polarization. A quad-ridged horn antenna is one of antenna types which have some characteristics satisfying the required specification. In this paper, the development of 3D printed quad-ridged horn antenna based on polylactid-acid (PLA) with metal conductive coating is proposed for tomography application. Some advantages of using 3D printing technology for the proposed antenna are light-weight, low-cost, and easy in fabrication. The ridge profile applied for the proposed antenna is a quadratic ridge which has been proven in bandwidth enhancement toward a lower operating frequency. It shows that the realized 3D printed QRHA has the weight lighter more than 65% compared to the computerized numerically controlled (CNC) based fabricated antenna. From the characterization result, the realized 3D printed QRHA yields the 10 dB working bandwidth in the frequency range of 3.5-11.4 GHz.