Accurate Modeling of Conductor Rough Surfaces in Waveguide Devices

Abstract

To address the effects of surface roughness on wave propagation in the microwave and millimeter-wave bands, this paper studies electromagnetic wave propagation and focuses on the propagation loss within an inner environment featuring surface roughness of the metallic waveguide structures. The conductivity gradient model is first developed to treat surface roughness with inhomogeneous conductivity, and then the concept of a frequency-dependent effective conductivity is introduced to model the effects of surface roughness in waveguide structures. With the effective conductivity used in the commercial 3D field solver, High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS™), a surface impedance boundary condition strategy is applied on ideally smooth surfaces to model the actual behavior of rough metallic waveguide surfaces. Finally, the propagation performance is predicted by comparing the effects of surface roughness in metallic waveguide structures and the results from the models with ideally smooth surfaces, using rectangular waveguide, cylindrical resonator and coupling cavity filters models. Overall, this effective conductive concept can be applied using various commercial field solvers to handle surface roughness effects accurately and efficiently in any work involving conducting microwave structures.