3D Additive Manufacturing of Tapered EBG Layers
for a Resonant-Cavity Antenna
Cristina Ponti
Department of Industrial, Electronic and
Mechanical Engineering and CNIT
‘Roma Tre’ University
Rome, Italy
2022 IEEE 21st Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference (MELECON) | 978-1-6654-4280-0/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/MELECON53508.2022.9843130
cristina.ponti@uniroma3.it
Silvio Ceccuzzi
Department of Fusion
and Nuclear Safety
ENEA
Rome, Italy
silvio.ceccuzzi@enea.it
Abstract—3D Fusion Deposition Modelling (FDM) technique
is applied, in combination with numerical machining technique,
to the fabrication of an Electromagnetic Band-Gap (EBG)
multilayer used as superstrate of a Resonant Cavity Antenna
(RCA). The primary source of the RCA is a rectangular
waveguide WR90 in the X-band, and it is backed by a metallic
plate, to form a cavity with the EBG placed above, which
behaves as a partially reflecting surface. The EBG superstate is
designed alternating three dielectric and planar layers, through
materials with a permittivity contrast, i.e., by alternating layers
having a high permittivity to a layer with low permittivity. This
scheme gives to the EBG material a broadband response. In the
in-plane design, each layer is shaped as a tapered grid of
rectangular holes, to reduce the field scattered at the edge of the
cavities, and thus lowering the Side Lobe Level in the antenna
radiation patterns. The fabrication of the low-permittivity layer
has been performed with additive manufacturing, through a
PLA filament which has a relative permittivity of 2.76. The
choice of PLA over ABS filament as printing material has been
dictated by the different handling of the inner parts of the
fabricated samples by the 3D printer. The high-permittivity
layers of the superstate, instead, are fabricated from pre-formed
vetronite layers, shaping the grid layout through numerically
controlled machining technique. The antenna prototype has
been measured in anechoic chamber, and experimental results
are in very good agreement with the numerical simulations.
Keywords— 3D Printing, Additive Manufacturing,
Electromagnetic-Band Gap (EBG), Periodic Structures, high
gain, Resonant-Cavity Antenna (RCA).
I. INTRODUCTION
Resonant-Cavity Antennas (RCAs), also called
Electromagnetic Band-Gap (EBG) Resonator Antennas, is a
class of antennas obtained by assembling a dielectric
superstrate to a primary source antenna, backed by a ground
plane [1] – [6]. The advantage of this architecture is in the
possibility to achieve a high gain with low dielectric losses.
The superstrate is a partially reflecting surface (PRS),
implemented trough an EBG material, i.e., as an artificial
material obtained by the repetition of a unit cell in one, two,
or three directions, working inside its frequency bandgap [7].
In the RCA, the EBG is placed at a resonating distance from
the ground plane, e.g., half a wavelength, and this makes the
This work was supported in part by by the Italian Ministry for Education,
University, and Research under the project PRIN2017 “Quick, reliable, cost
effective methodology for DIagnostics of Conformal Antennas (DI-CA),”
grant number 20177C3WRM_003.
978-1-6654-4280-0/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE
Paolo Baccarelli
Department of Industrial, Electronic and
Mechanical Engineering and CNIT
‘Roma Tre’ University
Rome, Italy
paolo.baccareli@uniroma3.it
Giuseppe Schettini
Department of Industrial, Electronic and
Mechanical Engineering and CNIT
‘Roma Tre’ University
Rome, Italy
giuseppe.schettini@uniroma3.it
RCA extremely narrow bandwidth. However, important
advancements in the field of RCA have been done, to also
obtain a broadband response, through the design of EBGs with
wideband selectivity, assembled to a wideband source
antenna. Wideband EBGs are different from traditional EBGs,
since the periodicity of the unit cell is broken up, and this has
been implemented though different approaches. The use of a
printed dielectric layer has been proposed in [7] – [8], for a
compact and low-profile antenna layout. Alternatively,
solutions adopting fully dielectric EBGs have been explored,
alternating one-dimensional multilayers of dielectric slabs of
different thickness and permittivity in a non-periodic manner
[9]. Further solutions based on fully dielectric materials for
broadband response rely on a single dielectric layer
discretized into sections of non-uniform height [10] or
permittivity [11] – [12].
In the fabrication of an EBG material, several
technological issues are involved. Regular shapes may be
obtained through standard cutting processes of preformed and
commercially available plastic or ceramic materials [6], [9] –
– [13]. However, the research in the fields of RCAs with
broadband EBGs paved the way also to the exploration of
more flexible fabrication techniques [14], [15].
In this work, a wideband EBG to be used as a superstrate
of a wideband RCA is presented, where the primary source is
a truncated WR90 waveguide, operating in the X band. The
wideband response is achieved alternating dielectric layers
having a permittivity contrast, but the concept of uniform
layers [9] is replaced by a taper in-plane grid structure of non-
uniform rectangular holes [16]. This grid layout aims at
reducing the scattered field at the edges of the superstates, to
achieve a lower Side Lobe Level in the antenna radiation
patterns [17]. In the EBG fabrication, the 3D printing with
Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) technique has been
applied to shape the low-permittivity grid layer used in the
EBG, through the PLA filament. The permittivity value of
PLA is compatible with the low-permittivity requirement of
EBG design and has been preferred to the use of ABS for
reasons dictated by the better handling of the inner parts from
the 3D printer. The additive manufacturing through the FDM
technique has turned out to be very effective in the production
of a customized geometry [18]. However, traditional cutting
564

of preformed dielectric layers had to be applied for the
fabrication of the high-permittivity layers of the EBG,
obtaining the grid layout from preformed vetronite layers, by
means of numerically controlled machining technique [19].
II. RCAS WITH WIDEBAND EBGS
A. Antenna layout
The considered layout of the RCA is reported in Fig. 1, in
its cross-sectional view. The RCA is obtained placing an EBG
superstrate above a ground plane, at a resonating distance. In
this layout, the EBG behaves as a PRS of cavity, which is
bounded also be the metallic plate of the ground plane, which
is a perfectly reflecting mirror. In this implementation, the
primary antenna source is a truncated rectangular waveguide,
backed by the ground plane. The EBG placed above works
inside its bandgap. When the EBG is used a cavity mirror,
radiation is filtered from the antenna source producing a
directive direction. However, with traditional EBGs, that are
obtained by periodic repetition of a unit cell, this filtering is
narrow bandwidth, and centered at the frequency
corresponding to the wavelength of the resonating distance in
the cavity length.
In this work, the EBG superstrate is implemented as a
multilayer, alternating three dielectric layers having a
permittivity contrast, to achieve a wideband selectivity when
used in the cavity layout [16]. Details of the thicknesses and
permittivies of the layers are given in Table I. In particular, as
to layers #1 and #3, they are high-permittivity dielectrics, with
relative permittivity of 6. Layer #2 is a low-permittivity one,
with a relative permittivity that should be of about 3 or lower,
in order to achieve a good dielectric contrast with layers #1
and #3. The design value is 2.76, to be compatible with the
plastic filaments handled by 3D additive manufacturing with
FDM printers. The EBG is placed at a height h = 0/2 from the
metallic plate, where h can be considered as the length of a
resonating cavity limited by a ground plane and an EBG, being
f0 = 11.9 GHz the central frequency of the operational
bandwidth of the antenna. A smaller cavity, of length h1, is
introduced as the separation distance between layer #1 and
layer #2 in the EBG, to enhance the bandwidth. The layers of
the EBG have side length LEBG = 4.5 cm. The primary source
antenna is a truncated rectangular waveguide WR90, with
standard aperture size 22.86 cm ×10.16 mm, and it is backed
by a metallic plate of length LGP = 11.5 cm.
Fig. 1. Cross-sectional view of the RCA.
565
z
y
x
Fig. 2. Perspective view of the RCA.
In Fig. 2, the perspective view of the antenna is shown,
where four vertical screws, made in Teflon, and side extension
are included in the final model to fix the layers at the wanted
height from the ground plane. In the in-plane realization, the
layers are not uniform, but designed with a tapered grid
structure of rectangular holes, with decreasing size from the
center to the edges. The choice of a tapered grid layout aims
at lowering the side radiation at truncation edges, thus
reducing the Side Lobe Level (SLL) in the radiation pattern,
as it will be shown in Section III.
TABLE I
DESIGN PARAMETERS FOR THE EBG
(PERMITTIVITY VALUES IN THE X BAND)
Layer 1 Layer 2 Layer 3 Cavities
t1 r1 t2 r2 t3 r3 h h1
[mm] [mm] [mm] [mm] [mm]
3 6 4 2.76 3 6 15 8
B. EBG fabrication
The fabrication of the EBG layers has been performed
using two different techniques. In the vetronite layers (layers
#1 and #3), the grid layout is obtained with numerically
controlled machining technique, cutting the holes on a pre-
formed layer. A picture of the final realization of one of the
two vetronite layers is reported in Fig. 3. As to layer #2, with
a design permittivity of 2.76, the realization of the tapered
layout is instead fabricated through fast prototyping with 3D
FDM printing technique. In general, FDM 3D printers can
handle filaments having a low permittivity value,
approximatively lower than 3, as it is in the PLA and ABS
filaments. Both materials may be considered as candidates for
the fabrication of layer #2, since they have a similar value of
permittivity. The measures on samples of a parallelepipedal
volume with size compatible with a WR 90 rectangular
waveguide, through a Vector Network Analyzer, returned the
following values for the dielectric parameters: r = 2.76 and
tan  = 0.014 for the PLA filament, and r = 2.74 and tan  =
0.012 for the ABS one. The PLA filament has been chosen for
the EBG prototyping, for reasons dictated by the need of
fabricating a layer that is filled with printing materials in all of
its inner parts. In the fabrication of ABS samples, indeed, a
honeycomb structure is introduced by the software of the 3D
printer in the interior of the layer, which reduces the effective
value of the permittivity, thus affecting the overall behavior of
the EBG. With the PLA material, instead, the presence of air
pockets introduced in the printing process is very low, also
thanks to a suitable CAD design of the layer internal structure.
However, the printed sample of layer #2 shows some air slots,
especially in its external side, but without affecting the
performances of the antenna, since the size of the air part is
very small compared to the operational wavelengths.
The high gain presented by the RCA can be explained
through the large equivalent radiating aperture at the top of the
EBG superstrate. This is confirmed by the field map of the
magnitude of the electric field at top of the EBG, in Fig. 7(a),
which shows a wide illumination across the EBG surface.
However, the illumination field across the aperture is not
uniform, but it presents a tapering from the center to the edges
of the EBG. The illumination tapering can be appreciated also
in Fig. 7(b), which shows the normalized magnitude of the E-
field across the top of the EBG, evaluated along the y-
direction. Such a tapering in the aperture field corresponds to
the overall effect of a low edge diffraction at the ends of the
EBG superstrate, and it is introduced thanks to the tapering in
in-plane realization of the grid structure in the EBG layers.
Finally, in Fig. 7(c) the map of the E-field is shown in the
cutting plane yz: this view shows the resonance of the field in
the cavity formed by the metallic plate and the EBG
superstates, which filters in the broadside direction the
radiation coming from the waveguide aperture, and a further
resonance taking place in the shorter air cavity inside the EBG.

Fig. 3. Realization of layer #1 (identical to layer #3) in vetronite.

Fig. 4. Realization of layer #2 in PLA with 3D printing with FDM Fig. 5. Photograph of the final antenna.
technique.

III. RESULTS
The dielectric layers presented in Section II have been
assembled to the primary antenna, made by a truncated
waveguide backed by a metallic plate as ground plane,
obtaining an RCA. In the final prototype, the metallic plate of
the ground plane has been fabricated through an aluminum
plate. Teflon screws and spacers have been employed to fix
the EBG layers shown in Figs. 3 and 4. The photograph of the
final antenna is reported in Fig. 5.
The antenna has been modelled and simulated with Ansys
HFSS [20]. The numerical simulations have returned a peak
gain of 15 GHz at 10.5 GHz and a fractional bandwidth of
36% around the central frequency of 11.9 GHz. In Fig. 6, the
plot of the gain versus frequency is compared to the one
relevant to the same primary source, i.e., the WR90 truncated
waveguide backed by the metallic plate, without EBG, Fig. 6. Simulated gain versus frequency compared to the gain of the antenna
showing a maximum gain is 8.8 GHz. The gain enhancement without the EBG superstrate. The EBG has been modelled using , the
introduced by the EBG can be appreciated over a broad nominal relitive permittivity measured on the PLA filament r = 2.76.
frequency interval, with an increase higher than 3 dB in the
bandwidth of the RCA.

566

(a)
(b)
(c)
Fig. 7. Magnitude of the E-field at 10.5 GHz: b) on the top face of the EBG
b) on the top face of the EBG, along a line in the y-direction (plot of the
normalized E-field); a) in the cutting plane yz.
The antenna has been measured in an anechoic chamber to
check its radiative behaviour at several frequencies in its
operating bandwidth. The plot of the antenna gain versus
frequency is reported in Fig. 8, comparing measured results in
anechoic chamber with results of the numerical analysis with
Ansys HFSS, showing a very good agreement. In the plot, the
numerical data have been also evaluated for lower values of
the permittivity of PLA in layer #2. The quality of the printed
layer in PLA is checked considering an effective relativ
permittivity, that may be lower than the nominal value of 2.76
measured on the PLA sample, if small air pockets are
introduced by the printing process. From the plot, it can be
observed that the variations in the simulated curve as the
permittivity of PLA is decreased are not responsible for the
discrepancies between the numerical and measured results.
567
This confirms that the effective value of the printed layer is
close to the nominal value of 2.76 of the PLA filament, thus
demonstrating effectiveness of FDM in the fabrication of
dielectric parts of antennas in this frequency range.
Fig. 8. Measured gain versus frequency compared to the simulated gain, for
different values of the PLA permittivity, i.e., the nominal relitive permittivity
measured on the PLA filament r = 2.76, and lower values of the PLA (r =
2.5 and r = 2.25) to represent an effective permittivity as a result of a printing
process leaving air parts in the printed layer. The value of the tand of PLA is
0.014.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors thank Microwave Vision Group for their
support in the antenna measurements, using their Starlab
(SL18) Spherical Near Field Measurement System.
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