Low-Cost Method for Internal Surface Roughness Reduction of Additively Manufactured All-Metal Waveguide Components

Abstract

In this study, a novel low-cost polishing method for internal surface roughness reduction of additively manufactured components, developed for waveguide (WG) circuits operating in the millimeter frequency range is proposed. WG components fabricated using powder bed fusion (PBF) generally feature roughness of ten to fifty microns, which influences the increase of roughness-related conductor power losses having a major effect on the electrical performance of additively manufactured all-metal WGs. To improve and decrease the surface roughness of circuits fabricated using PBF, glass microbeads as an abrasive medium are proposed to be used in combination with a rotary tumbler. This technique allows the abrasive medium to efficiently penetrate internal long channels and cavities, having cross section dimensions in the range of sub-to a few millimeters. An experimental study was carried out on an example of WG sections and bandpass filters fabricated using PBF through selective laser melting (SLM), operating within the 8.2 to 40 GHz range. Polishing impact on both mechanical and electrical properties was studied showing surface roughness reduction by 18% and sixth order filter’s insertion loss reduction at 23 GHz by 40% after 24 h of tumbling with 300–400 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math> </inline-formula> m large glass microbeads.