Design of Edge-Slotted Waveguide Array Antenna Manufactured by Injection-Molding

Abstract

This paper presents an edge-slotted waveguide array antenna manufactured by injection-molding for dual-polarized phased array antennas. A slotted waveguide array antenna offers excellent performance, including a high efficiency and low cross polarization. However, its applications are limited due to its heavy weight and high cost caused by a metal machining process. These disadvantages can be improved by resin-injection-molding. Antennas manufactured by injection-molding require additional supporting structures to suppress distortion, which results in the degradation of the sidelobe level. In this paper, a maximum sidelobe level of −32.4 dB is obtained for an array radiation pattern by adopting irises that cancel the effect of the supporting structures in a simulation.