Strut Analysis and Effect on Performance of Cassegrain Reflector Antennas at mm-Wave D-band

This paper presents the effect of circular cross-section struts used on two 30cm diameter Cassegrain reflector antennas appropriate for the 5G mm-Wave D-band. The Cassegrain antennas and their feed horns geometry, simulation models and performance are presented. Struts' analysis main aim is to study the effect of strut diameter using parametric analysis. Maximum degradation on gain, compared with the no-struts reference case, is found to be 1.4dB. Also, Perfect Electric Conductor (PEC) and Polyamide (PA) dielectric struts' materials are examined, where different performance was noticed. Finally, a real and feasibly solution using struts of diameter equal to 10mm (approximate to 5 lambda in D-band) has been proposed for various realistic strut materials.