Industry Days - Additive Manufacturing for RF/Microwave hardware

RF Feed and Antenna Developments for Space Applications

16 Oct 2018, 16:30

30m

Newton 1&2 (ESA/ESTEC)

Speaker

Mr Michael Kilian (Airbus Defence and Space GmbH)

Description

Caused by the upcoming interest in very high throughput satellites (VHTS), the market for satellites is requesting satellite systems with high transmission capacities and a high number of beams. To realize the data rates needed for big data, antenna systems with large bandwidth as well as high power capabilities are necessary. To meet these requirements, active multiple beam antennas are used. These antenna systems can re-use allocated frequency bands, so that the spectral efficiency will increase significantly. A typical multiple spot scenario consists of a single offset reflector fed by a horn cluster. Single feed per beam feed chains are used to generate one beam with one horn. Especially multiple feed per beam scenarios result in a high number of horns per antenna, hence new demands concerning accommodation, thermal concept, mass, costs and lead time are raised. Additive manufacturing has potential to fulfill the upcoming demands. Because of more degrees of freedom and new manufacturing boundaries, other possibilities for accommodation and especially for mass and cost saving were investigated. Airbus Defence and Space analysed the use of additive layer manufacturing of RF components regarding RF performance as well as savings in thermal, mechanical and financial topics. Besides detailed loss analysis of different materials and waveguide shapes single feed components as well as complete feed chains including network and horn were designed, manufactured and measured. Previous and current results and activities will be presented and discussed. These results are showing the potential using of additive manufacturing for RF space components.

Why your contribution is relevant for the event?

In frame of the ESA 5B.121 ADMAC (Advanced Desing and Manufacturing Techniques for Antenne Feed Chains) Airbus Defence and Space Germany started to develop RF feed chain components. Beside this project more investigations were performed to get more knowledge about the advantages and disadvantages of additive manufacturing for commercial products.
This knowledge is used to offer our knowledge and products to the customers.