Rapid Prototyping of Reduced-Height Dielectric Lens with One-Take 3D Printing for Antenna Directivity Enhancement

In this work, we present a method for designing a dielectric lens with a reduced height that is easily printed with one-take 3D printing. For the first time, we prove that the configuration of a printout made of resin material can be modified for effective permittivity variation and apply the technique to a lens antenna design. The lens is printed with SLA printing and mounted on top of a conventional patch antenna, resulting in a 6.87 dB directivity improvement. The height of the proposed lens is reduced by about 15% compared to the reference lens design. The final proposed lens antenna operates at 5.8 GHz, with a height and diameter of 1.35 λ and 1.35 λ, respectively. A prototype was built, and all of the computed expectations from the full-wave electromagnetic simulations in this work were verified experimentally.