It is known that electromagnetic performances of planar antenna structures can be impacted by the mechanical/manufacturing tolerances. What does this impact mean? And what are the antenna properties (gain, radiation patterns, dimensions..) that are the most affected by these tolerances ?
For digital antenna array, the mechanical/manufacturing tolerances have a big impact in the context of maximum deep of nulling for anti-jammer protection and maximal accuracy of signals parameters estimation. As for example, you can see these publications:
Conference Paper LIMITING DEPTH OF JAMMER'S SUPPRESSION IN A DIGITAL ANTENNA ...
Article Influence of jitter in ADC on precision of direction-finding...
Article Investigation technique of the linear dynamic band of the re...
Conference Paper Correction of smart antennas receiving channels characterist...
Article Correction method of quadrature disbalance of digital antenn...
Dear Mr Tounsi, for a planar waveguide antenna we presented detailed analysis in our paper
M Kashif Nawaz, Hafsa Farid, Irfan Majid, Experimental Study of the Effects of Precision Machining on the Performance of a Slotted Waveguide Antenna, Proceedings of International Bhurban Conference on Applied Sciences & Technology, 2010, Islamabad, Pakistan
Full text is available at Article EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF PRECISION MACHINING ON ...
However, in my very many years of dealing with airborne antenna applications the lesson learnt is manufacturing imperfections are always there, but the rule of thumb is that if this tolerance remains less than lambda/20 of the operating frequency both for element spacing and element size the overall effect on performance is negligible. Regards
To continue the point o view of Irfan Majid I need to say, that technologies of 3D printing of antennas give good results for THz frequencies as well. In this case, mechanical defects of 3D printing were less than lambda/10. Similar limits used for sizes of metamaterials cells:
Conference Paper Metamaterials on antenna solutions
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