Meshed Rectangular Waveguide For High Power, Low Loss And Reduced Weight Applications

Additive manufacturing technologies are increasingly being demonstrated to be useful for microwave circuits, showing improved performance in multiple cases. In this work, a meshed rectangular waveguide structure is presented as an option for high power, low loss, but also reduced weight applications. A set of meshed Ku band waveguides was fabricated using binder jetting 3D printing technology showing that the weight can be reduced by 22% with an increase in loss of only 5%, from 0.019 dB/cm for the solid part to 0.020 dB/cm average across the band with the meshed design. Further weight reduction is possible if higher loss is allowed. To demonstrate the concept, a comparison is made between non-meshed and meshed waveguide 4 pole Chebyshev filters.