Optimisation and fabrication by 3D printing of a ceiling antenna for communication applications

This paper presents a new ceiling antenna optimised by applying differential evolution (DE) and fabricated by 3D printing. The frequency band of the antenna ranges from 0.75 GHz to 3 GHz. The geometric structure refers to volcano smoke antenna, which contains a teardrop as the radiating element and a curved ground plane. Curves in structure are determined by cubic spline interpolation function. The antenna design problem is converted into a constrained optimisation problem (COP), which is solved by DE next. Some optimised antennas are found, and one of them is presented in this paper. The measured result basically meets the antenna requirement, which means ceiling antenna proposed in this paper could work for 2G, 3G and 4G LTE bands and also for WiFi frequency bands theoretically. For such this complex-shaped three-dimensional antenna, we choose 3D printing to fabricate. The measured result almost matches the simulation.