X-band Slotted Waveguide Antenna

M.Tayyab Azim,Seong-Ook Park

Microwave and Antenna Lab
Electrical Engineering,KAIST
291 Daehak-ro,Yuseong-gu,Daejeon,South Korea
tayyabazim@kaist.ac.kr,soparky@kaist.ac.kr

Abstract—A planar slot array antenna of 12x16 elements

is designed at X-band with uniform aperture distribution to
get maximum aperture efficiency. The antenna is centre fed
from iris coupling slot with alternate slot inclinations to feed
the radiating waveguides in phase. A feeding network of non-
standard waveguides is formed to couple the power from feeding
network to radiating aperture. A radiating aperture also of
non-standard size is selected to give the low profile antenna at
9.65GHz. The longitudinal shunt slots are used with alternate
offsets directions to radiate in phase at boresight.
Index Terms—Longitudinal shunt slot,series inclined slot, uni-
form aperture illumination,aperture efficiency.

I. I NTRODUCTION
A resonant slotted waveguide antenna is presented with a
feeding network. An extensive study on slot antennas has been
given in [1], [2] for slot array design antennas. A number
of slot types can be used as radiators like longitudinal offset
slots in broad wall(shunt), inclined slots in broad wall(series) Fig. 1. Antenna Array and feeding network
and inclined slots on narrow wall (shunt). The slots in the
waveguide disturb the current along the waveguide and as a TABLE I
result radiate.The slot array has a feeding network structure C OUPLING P OWER DIVIDER
under the radiating layer in case of a centre fed case. In end
fed case the slots are fed from the start of the waveguide. Slot No Coupling Coupling dB
A longitudinal slot is a shunt slot and for shunt elements Slot#6 16.667% -7.7806dB
the admittance is matched to the characteristic admittance of Slot#5 20% -6.9897dB
Slot#4 25% -6.0206dB
the waveguide. We have a 12 waveguide slot array with 16 Slot#3 33.33% -4.07712dB
elements in each waveguide. The structure is shown in Fig 1. Slot#2 50% -3.0103dB
Slot#1 100% 0dB
II. F EEDING N ETWORK
The feeding network is a series feeding network and the
coupling coefficient of each slot is different. The coupling of
waveguide (6,7) is minimum as it is the first in line and as the available and it couples 100% power. As the coupling slots
power in feeding line decreases the coupling increases to keep are series slots the distance between the centre of last slot and
the effective power in radiating apertures equal. The coupling the waveguide short is λg /2. For uniform aperture distribution
coefficient is calculated as the amplitude and phase of the slots has to be similar. The
amplitude and phase matching of the feeding network is shown
1/N in the Fig 2 and Fig 3 which show that the amplitude is almost
η= (1)
1 − ( n−1
N ) equal at 9.65GHz and phase is also matched at 9.65GHz. The
where n=1..N and N=6. The coupling in dB of slots 6-1 feeding network can perform at frequency band of 9.5-9.8GHz
is given in TableI. The coupling of slots 7-12 is same as 6- with amplitude mismatch of ± 0.7 dB and phase mismatch of
1. Last slot of power feeding network has minimum power ±15o . The coupling of slot#5 is shown in Fig 4. The slot also
has an iris which helps in maintaining equal phase at output
This work was supported by Institute of Information & communications of waveguide. Fig 4 also shows the power coupled at slot#5
Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korea givern- is 6.9dB same as required from TableI. Similarly all slots are
ment (MSIT) (No.2018-0-00733,Development of testing and verification
technology for 5G mobile communications supporting eMBB,URLLC and designed for coupling mentioned in TableI. The e-fields in
mMTC). feeding network are shown in Fig 5
 Fig. 2. Equal amplitude power divider @ 9.65GHz.
Fig. 5. Absolute Electric field plot in power divider.

last slot and wavegiude short is λg /4. The feeding waveguide

couples the power to radiating waveguide and the length of
radiating waveguide is made to produce standing waves in
them. In small arrays design procedure given by Elliot in [1]
is helpful as it measures the mutual coupling of each slot
and then iteratively the offsets of each slot are determined
for a given normalised conductance.In a large array it is
cumbersome to use formulation in [1] however an infinite array
approach given in [3] and [4] is used to find longitudinal slot
resonant lengths and offsets. A pair of slots is used in boundary
conditions and active S-parameters of a slot is used to find its
admittance and eventually conductance and susceptance by
−2Γ
Fig. 3. Equal phase power divider @ 9.65GHz. y= (2)
1+Γ
The real part of admittance gives the conductance and imag-
inary part gives susceptance of a longitudinal shunt slot. The
resonant lengths are calculated at each offset. This data set
gives the mutual coupling adjusted admittance and it can be
directly used in the design of an array. For 9.65GHz and
a=21mm and b=5 mm the slot curves for conductance vs
resonant length are given in Fig 6 while curve for susceptance
vs resonant length is given in Fig 7. From Fig 6 and Fig 7 it
can be seen that the conductance increases as the slot offset
increases and at maximum conductance the slot susceptance
is 0 indicating a resonant condition. Similarly the resonant
conductance vs the slot offset are shown in Fig 8.
N
X
end f ed case gn = 1 (3)
n=1

N
Fig. 4. Coupling response of slot# 5. X
centre f ed case gn = 2 (4)
n=1
III. R ADIATING A PERTURE The conductance sum for end fed and centre fed case are
The total slots in a radiating waveguide is 16. Each slot given in (3) and (4). We will use (4) as we have centre fed
is separated by a distance of λg /2 and the spacing between feeding network. The conductance of each slot comes out to
 Fig. 6. Conductance of slot with PBC.

Fig. 9. Complete antenna with feeding network

IV. C ONCLUSION
Fig 9 shows the simulated results of complete antenna
system with feeding network. An infinite antenna array ap-
proach has been used to design the planar array with an equal
power feeding network. A slot pair was characterised with
periodic boundaries and the results were used to design the
uniform aperture antenna with maximum gain and narrow
beamwidth. The interface of the feeding network is standard
Fig. 7. Susceptance of slot with PBC. WR-90 however the internal dimensions are changed to match
the radiating waveguide dimension for slot spacing in feeding
network. Commercial EM software HFSS and CST were used
in simulation of the array design.
R EFERENCES
[1] R. S. Elliot, Antenna Theory and Design. IEEE, 1981.
[2] R. Elliott, “An improved design procedure for small arrays of shunt slots,”
IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 48–
53, January 1983.
[3] H. Y. Yee, “The design of large waveguide arrays of shunt slots,” IEEE
Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. 40, no. 7, pp. 775–781,
July 1992.
[4] L. Josefsson and S. Rengarajan, Slotted Waveguide Array Anten-
nas:Theory analysis and design. Institution of Engineering and Tech-
nology, 2018.

Fig. 8. Normalised admittance of slot vs offset.

be 2/16=0.125. The slot offset that gives 0.125 conductance

is 0.95mm. Resonant slot of offset 0.95 is taken from the
slot characterisations. The measured slot offsets and lengths
are used in radiating aperture. The slot voltages are observed
and the fields on each slot is shown in Fig 9a where it
can be seen that they are excited in phase and with equal
amplitude. Fig 9b shows the return loss S11 of the antenna
system while Fig 9c &Fig 9d show the E-plane and H-plane
radiation pattern of the antenna. The side lobe level can be
observed as 13dB indicating a uniform aperture distribution
and maximum aperture efficiency.