Polarization-Insensitive Unit Cells for a Cost-Effective Design of a 3-D-Printed Fresnel-Lens Antenna

A 3-D printed Fresnel-lens antenna formed by dielectric unit cells insensitive to polarization is presented in this article. The proposed unit cell can be implemented in any azimuth orientation, simplifying the design and the implementation of the Fresnel subzones, which is an advantage over the previous 3-D-printed Fresnel-lens designs. The unit cell exhibits a T-shaped geometry capable of providing no change in relative permittivity under TE polarizations orthogonal to each other. The novel design of the unit cell also provides robustness under oblique incidence and frequency. These features allow the radial arrangement of the unit cells to configure the subzones of the Fresnel lens, ensuring the desired relative permittivity. Additionally, the geometry of the printed unit cells enables self-supported subzones with the minimum number of unit cells per subzone. A 3-D-printed prototype of the proposed Fresnel lens was manufactured by stereolithography (SLA). The measurement results showed a good agreement with the simulated ones. The measured gain was 26.5 +/- 0.5 dBi from 55 GHz to 65 GHz with a mean antenna efficiency of 79%.