Wave Propagation Along a Helical Step-Loaded Groove Waveguide

TLDR: In this paper, a step-loaded groove waveguide is presented and analyzed by means of a field-matching method, and the dispersion equation of this structure is derived by using a field matching method.

Abstract: A new kind of helical groove structure, step-loaded groove waveguide is presented and analyzed in this paper. The dispersion equation of this structure is derived by means of a field-matching method. This equation may be reduced to the dispersion equation of helical ridge-loaded structure and rectangular one. In order to demonstrate the influence of the step on the dispersion properties, the comparison of the dispersion characteristics is made in these helical rectangular and modified rectangular groove structures. Form the analysis, it is shown that the step loading tends to reduce the dispersion of the helical groove circuit and the step-loaded structure has the weaker dispersion compared with the rectangular one or the ridge-loaded one. The effect of the step shape on the wave properties is also discussed under the deep groove case. The theoretical results explicitly indicate that the V-like step-loaded structure has the weakest dispersion in all step-loaded structures.