H - and E -Plane Loaded Slow Wave Structure for W -Band TWT

Billa, Laxma and Akram, M. Nadeem and Paoloni, Claudio and Chen, Xuyuan (2020) H - and E -Plane Loaded Slow Wave Structure for W -Band TWT. IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, 67 (1). pp. 309-313. ISSN 0018-9383

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Abstract

Sheet beam vacuum electron tubes are an attractive solution for high-power sources or amplifiers at millimeter-waves. In this article, a novel W -band slow wave structure (SWS) for traveling wave tube (TWT) amplifiers supporting a sheet beam is proposed. The SWS is based on a rectangular waveguide with H - and E -plane loaded (HEL) metal corrugations. A test structure of the proposed HEL SWS with purposely designed input and output couplers was built in the frequency range of 91–98 GHz ( W -band). The measured scattering-parameters agree well with the simulations showing S11<−15 dB over 10-GHz bandwidth. A TWT was designed and simulated with the HEL SWS. It shows very good gain-bandwidth performance. The SWS is easy to manufacture by low-cost computer numerical controlled (CNC)-milling. The results demonstrated that the HEL SWS is a very good solution to build high-power, wideband millimeter-wave TWTs for a wide range of applications that need high power in a broad frequency range.