| Abstract | The area of research of this thesis is built around advanced waveguide filter structures. Waveguide filters and the waveguide technology in general are renowned for high power capacity, low losses and excellent electromagnetic shielding. Waveguide filters are important components in fixed wireless communications as well as in satellite and radar systems. Furthermore, their advantages and utilization become even greater with increase in frequency, which is a trend in modern communication systems because upper frequency bands offer larger channel capacities.
However, waveguide filters are relatively bulky and expensive. To comply with more and more demanding miniaturization and cost-cutting requirements, compactness and economical design represent some of the main contemporary focuses of interest. Approaches that are used to achieve this include use of planar inserts to build waveguide discontinuities, additive manufacturing and substrate integration. At the same time, waveguide filters still need to satisfy opposed stringent requirements like small insertion loss, high selectivity and multiband operation. Another difficulty that metal waveguide components face is integration with other circuitry, especially important when solid-state active devices are included. Thus, improvements of interconnections between waveguide and other transmission interfaces are addressed too.
The thesis elaborates the following aspects of work:
Further analysis and improved explanations regarding advanced waveguide filters with E-plane inserts developed by the Wireless Communications Research Group, using both cross coupled resonators and extracted pole sections (Experiments with higher filter orders, use of tuning screws, degrees of freedom in design, etc. Thorough performance comparison with competing filter technologies)
- Proposing novel E-plane filter sections with I-shaped insets
- Extension of the E-plane filtering structures with metal fins to new compact dual band filters with high frequency selectivity and miniaturized diplexers.
- Introduction of easy-to-build waveguide filters with polymer insert frames and high-performance low-profile cavity filters, taking advantage of enhanced fabrication capabilities when using additive manufacturing
- Developing new substrate integrated filters, as well as circuits used to transfer signals between different interfaces
Namely, these are substrate integrated waveguide to metal waveguide planar transitions that do not require any modifications of the metal waveguides. Such novel transitions have been designed both for single and orthogonal signal polarizations. |
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