Design of a Rectangular Waveguide Antenna for Automotive Side and Rear Radar Sensor Applications

In this paper, a waveguide antenna is designed and fabricated for side and rear radar sensor of vehicles in UWB (Ultra Wide Band) high band (center frequency : 9.5 GHz, -10 dB bandwidth : 600 MHz (6.4 %)). For the radar antenna, a probe fed rectangular waveguide antenna having simple structure and wide bandwidth is used. An important performance factor in this antenna is the isolation between transmitting (TX) and receiving (RX) waveguide antennas because this radar system uses TX and RX antennas separately. Thus the isolation between two antennas was simulated for E-plane and H-plane array. As a result, it was verified that the isolation of the H-plane array of the antennas is better than E-plane array, due to the TE10 mode. Therefore, H-plane arrayed waveguide antennas were mounted on a T-shaped radar module and performance of antennas was investigated. The -10 dB bandwidth of the TX and RX antenna mounted on T-shaped radar module was measured as 1000 MHz (10.52 %) and 1090 MHz (11.47 %) respectively and the isolation is less than -50 dB in the operation band. The peak gain is 7.65 dBi for the TX antenna and 7.26 dBi for the RX antenna and the beamwidth of H-plane of TX and RX antenna was measured as and respectively. Consequently, we verified that the proposed waveguide antenna is appropriate for a vehicle radar applications.