A Compensation Method for Reducing the Influence of Printing Voids on the Wave Propagation Properties of FDM-manufactured Dielectric Waveguides

This contribution investigates the influence of printing voids, caused by 3D-FDM printing, on the propagation properties of such manufactured dielectric waveguides. For compensating the void effect, the paper evaluates an easy accessible estimation method, which includes the measurable mass density, dielectric mixing equations and a propagation model for rectangular and quadratic dielectric waveguides. For the validation of the proposed method numerous test objects were printed with different printer settings and were further characterized. The final results regarding the printed material’s effective permittivity and resulting propagation properties are discussed in detail. Furthermore, the printing void’s influence on applicable operation bands is presented and compensation measures are proposed.