Print Quality Assessment of Additively Manufactured Resonant Structures

Due to the increased popularity of additive manufacturing (AM) and availability of electrically conductive filaments, the potential for using AM to fabricate high frequency resonant structures has been realized. As these structures require specific operating conditions to provide the desired resonant response (such as substrate/superstrate material, operating frequency, polarization, etc.), print quality validation through an assessment of the resonant response can be difficult to accomplish. To this end, active microwave thermography (AMT) is proposed as an alternative technique to assess and validate an AM resonant structure. Two AM resonant structures were manufactured using fused deposition modeling (FDM) and the resonant and AMT responses measured. The results indicate that AMT has strong potential for print quality validation of AM resonant structures without complicated reproduction of the operating conditions required to achieve the designed-for resonant response.