Design and Fabrication of Three Dimensional Dielectric and Magnetic Composites for Satcom Antenna Applications

In this paper we presented the design of a compact SATCOM antenna with pre-specified bandwidth requirements. We demonstrated that a novel design procedure accompanied by filtering and post processing techniques is capable of designing novel material composites with tremendous performance improvement for broadband antennas. The proposed design procedure was based on the integration of full wave finite element analysis (FEA) and topology design method employing sequential linear programming (SLP). A simple yet effective dry powder compacting method - "sand painting" was invented that is capable of producing multi-layer multi-ceramic variations in 3D. This fabrication technique is specifically invented to produce the resulting volumetric multimaterial variation using off-the-shelf powders and can be extended to allow for magnetic and conductor inclusions as discussed at the conference