Special Issue
  • Additively Manufactured Fiber-Reinforced Composite-Integrated Curved Dual-Band Conformal Antenna for UAV Winglet Applications

  • Tomasz Korgul*, Dong-Jin Park*, Do-Hyeon Jin*, Jung-Ryul Lee*†

  • * Department of Aerospace Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

  • This article is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper reports the design and experimental validation of a curved dual-band conformal antenna integrated into an additively manufactured fiber-reinforced composite UAV winglet module. A curvature-matched microstrip patch is optimized through full-wave simulation and embedded within a lightweight composite shell designed to preserve the local leading-edge geometry. The final prototype is characterized by return-loss and far-field measurements in an anechoic environment, confirming dual-band impedance matching and forward-directed radiation suitable for wireless communication links.


Keywords: Conformal antenna, Fiber-reinforced composite, Additive manufacturing, Dual-band patch, Robotic measurement

This Article

Correspondence to

  • Jung-Ryul Lee

  • * Department of Aerospace Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

  • E-mail: leejrr@kaist.ac.kr