Industry Days - Additive Manufacturing for RF/Microwave hardware

Polymer-based additive manufacturing of feed-chain components and antennas (SWISSto12)

23 Nov 2016, 09:25

25m

NA052 -Erasmus Conference Room (ESA/ESTEC)

Speakers

Dr Maria Garcia Vigueras (INSA/IETR)Dr Tomislav Debogovic (SWISSto12)

Description

During the past couple of years, SWISSto12 has developed a proprietary additive manufacturing (AM) technique for the production of RF components. The technique combines high mechanical precision (+/-25 um locally) and low surface roughness (a few hundred nanometers). In essence, it consists of two main steps: first a polymer-based body of a piece is fabricated by stereolithographic (SLA) AM process, and then the body is metal coated using an electroless plating technique developed by the company. The SWISSto12 AM technique is believed to be particularly appropriate for feed-chain components and antennas operating at Ku band, Ka band, and above. It enables low-loss, light and monolithic components in contrast to classical subtractive-machined split-block components that demand careful assembly and often exhibit relatively large weight due to extra metal and flanges needed for the assembly. In addition, the SWISSto12 AM technique, as most AM techniques, enables relatively inexpensive and fast fabrication with inherent design flexibility (geometrical freedom). A number of products fabricated by SWISSto12 will be presented. The first demonstrator is a Ku-band diplexer, developed in collaboration with Laboratory of Electromagnetics and Antennas (LEMA-EPFL), based on two rectangular waveguide filters with inductive irises. The measured RL and IL are in the order of 20 dB and 0.4 dB, respectively. To demonstrate the extended design flexibility, a Ku-bandpass filter based on super-ellipsoid cavities, as designed by Airbus Defence and Space (UK), is also presented. The measurement results reveal RL and IL better than 20 dB and 0.2 dB, respectively. Recently, SWISSto12 has fabricated for ESA a monolithic dual reflector antenna in Ku-band. The antenna exhibits gain of 24 dBi and 27 dBi in the RX- and TX-band, respectively, and overall excellent agreement with theoretical predictions. One of the latest fabricated antennas is a dual-polarized leaky-wave antenna operating at 30 GHz developed in collaboration with IETR. This antenna, also made of a single piece, contains a leaky waveguide section, an OMT, and a waveguide bend and twist. The measurement results are in good agreement with theoretical predictions.

JUSTIFICATION FOR THE CONSIDERATION

We would like to present our recent developments in SLA-AM of feed-chain components and antennas, namely results for a Ku-band bandpass filter, Ku-band diplexer, Ku-band dual reflector antenna, and Ka-band leaky wave antenna.
We believe that our talk would be relevant as the results to be presented consider performant additively manufactured RF hardware for space communications.
The presentation would demonstrate capabilities of the technology used and incite discussion.