Advancing 60-GHz SISO radar: additively manufactured leaky wave antenna with enhanced beam steering

In this work, a waveguide-based leaky wave antenna (LWA) for beam scanning operation at 60GHz is presented, fabricated, and experimentally investigated. It employs a slotted radiator in a rectangular waveguide, achieves a beam squint of 76° with 5.5-GHz bandwidth, offering enhanced angular resolution. The antenna employs dual feeding, thereby virtually doubling the bandwidth, which permits more beam scan angle per employed physical bandwidth in radar systems for precise angle estimation. The antenna was fabricated using SLA 3-D printing and subsequently silver-coated, enabling efficient production of complex 3-D antenna geometries. As expected, printing inaccuracies and metallization processes influence the antenna gain and beam squint. However, these effects can not only be reduced but even fully eliminated through targeted optimization of the manufacturing process, as demonstrated in this article. By combining application-specific antenna design with optimized fabrication techniques, best-in-class performance can be achieved despite the constraints of additive manufacturing. Compared with previous works, the antenna presented herein offers a unique combination of a large squint angle, high-operating frequency, and practical manufacturability. By combining the beam squint with dual feeding, a balance between high-range resolution and precise angle estimation is achieved in radar applications.

Subjects

Additive manufacturing

angle estimation

leaky wave antenna (LWA)

single input single output (SISO) radar

DDC Class

621.38: Electronics, Communications Engineering

681.2: Testing, Measuring, Sensing Instruments

Lizenz

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Publication version

publishedVersion

Name

Advancing_60-GHz_SISO_Radar_Additively_Manufactured_Leaky_Wave_Antenna_With_Enhanced_Beam_Steering.pdf

Type

Main Article

Size

2.76 MB

Format

Adobe PDF

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Advancing 60-GHz SISO radar: additively manufactured leaky wave antenna with enhanced beam steering