Design and construction of ferrite waveguide circulator with short wall in S band

Abstract

Abstract One of the most important components in the radar and microwave industry that provides transmitting and receiving features for an antenna at the same time is called a circulator. Ferrite circulators are passive three‐port devices in which the RF or microwave signal is transmitted from one port to other port without leakage to the third port. One of the main disadvantages of these waveguide elements is their large dimensions and especially their height, which cannot be used in some systems due to the limited workspace. This paper solves this problem by exploiting an incomplete wall waveguide to reduce the height of the circulator by 50%. These changes always reduce the frequency bandwidth of the element, the proposed technique optimizes the dimensions of the ferrite and its magnetic characteristics and increases the bandwidth to 400 MHz in 2.9 GHz, which is the ideal bandwidth required by many radar systems that have been reached. The ferrite circulator designed and built in this article has a port with a width of 72.13 mm and a height of 17 mm in the S‐band. The method results in a low insertion loss which is less than 0.5 decibels and a high isolation which created more than 20 decibels. The designed and optimized elements have been implemented and the test results verify the theoretical results.

Keywords

• circulator
• ferrite
• low insertion loss
• microwave devices
• three‐port transmitter