Permittivity-Customizable Ceramic-Doped Silicone Substrates Shaped With 3-D-Printed Molds to Design Flexible and Conformal Antennas

3-D-Printing in antenna design is a recent research branch which is attracting academic and industrial interest. Nevertheless, despite the advantages in terms of antenna customizability, common filaments exhibit limitations in some contexts where platform tolerability, flexibility, and compactness a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on antennas and propagation 2020-06, Vol.68 (6), p.4967-4972
Main Authors: Catarinucci, L., Chietera, F. P., Colella, R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
3-D printing
Aluminum oxide
Antenna design
Antennas
Barium titanates
Ceramic molds
Ceramics
conformable substrates
conformal antennas
customizable permittivity
Customization
Dielectric constant
Electromagnetics
Filaments
Flexibility
low losses
Patch antennas
Permittivity
Polylactic acid
Radio frequency identification
RFID
Size reduction
Substrates
Three dimensional printing
wearable
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Description
Summary:3-D-Printing in antenna design is a recent research branch which is attracting academic and industrial interest. Nevertheless, despite the advantages in terms of antenna customizability, common filaments exhibit limitations in some contexts where platform tolerability, flexibility, and compactness are simultaneously required. Indeed, other than a rather low permittivity of commercial 3-D-printable materials, when flexibility is required, also significant loss tangent values must be accounted. To address this problem, a method to realize conformable flexible low-loss substrates with increased and customizable permittivity is proposed in this communication. It is based on the synthesis of ceramic-doped silicone structures shaped through 3-D-printed molds by using alumina and barium titanate as ceramic filler. Different substrates were firstly realized and characterized in terms of permittivity and loss tangent at different doping percentages. Then, a first validation on 2.4 GHz conformal patch antennas exploiting both third dimension and increased permittivity is presented. Finally, a wearable and compact bracelet-shaped UHF RFID planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA)-inspired flexible antenna is designed, tested when applied on the human body, and compared with a previously realized version 3-D-printed in polylactic acid. In spite of comparable performance, the novel device exhibits considerable size reduction and improved wearability, thus confirming the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
ISSN:0018-926X
1558-2221
DOI:10.1109/TAP.2020.2969748