Researchers create new compound to build space-age antennas

Science Daily  February 29, 2024 Additive manufacturing with high-performance polymers can realize lightweight and complex geometries that can also be manufactured on board. However, polymers are electromagnetically inefficient for applications requiring electrical conductivity, such as guiding microwave signals. An international team of researchers (Canada, USA – Drexel University) developed MXene coated high-efficiency, lightweight additively manufactured microwave components with waveguiding functionality from 8 to 33 GHz, covering low earth orbit (LEO) frequencies, with a power-handling capability up to 10 dB and a transmission coefficient of 93 %. After a single dip-coating cycle, the polymer waveguide performed only 2 % below an […]

Towards a new antenna paradigm with waveform-selective metasurfaces

Nanowerk  February 28, 2023 Although various modulation schemes have been proposed to efficiently use the limited frequency resources by exploiting several degrees of freedom, antenna performance is essentially governed by frequency only. An international team of researchers (Japan, Italy, USA – UK) has proposed an antenna design concept based on metasurfaces to manipulate antenna performances in response to the time width of electromagnetic pulses. They numerically and experimentally showed that by using a proper set of spatially arranged metasurfaces loaded with lumped circuits, ordinary omnidirectional antennas could be reconfigured by the incident pulse width to exhibit directional characteristics varying over […]

Mechanical engineering meets electromagnetics to enable future technology

Science Daily  February 13, 2023 Reconfigurable electromagnetic devices, specifically reconfigurable antennas, have shown to be integral to the future of communication systems. However, mechanically robust designs that can survive real-world, harsh environment applications and high-power conditions remain rare. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have developed the general framework for a field of both discrete and continuously mechanically reconfigurable devices by combining compliant mechanisms with electromagnetics. They demonstrated a reconfigurable compliant mechanism antenna which exhibited continuously tunable performance across a broad band of frequencies. Three additional examples were also introduced to showcase the versatility and advanced capabilities of compliant mechanism enabled […]

Nanobridged rhombic antennas that support both dipolar and high-order plasmonic modes

Phys.org  January 6, 2022 An international team of researchers (USA – UC Santa Barbara, China) designed and fabricated a multiscale nanobridged rhombic antenna that supported two dominant resonances in the charge-transfer plasmon (CTP) band and a bridged dipolar plasmon (BDP) band which looks like a quadruple resonance. Compared with other nanobridged structures, such as nanobridged-disks or rectangles, the nanobridged rhombic antenna (NBRA ) shows distinct multiband resonances in the mid-infrared region in the simulated extinction spectra. The hotspots of the NBRA are located at the extremities of the structure, while the hotspots of nanobridged-disks or rectangles at the CTP resonance […]

Researchers create origami-inspired satellite antennas that can self-fold

TechXplore  February 4, 2021 Satellites and space vehicles will need to pack more cargo for the long haul. However, certain items, like dish antennas used for wireless communication, pose a challenge since they cannot be very densely packed for flight because of their signature bowl shape. A team of researchers in the US (Texas A&M University, Pennsylvania State University, UC Irvine) has designed, fabricated, and characterized a self-foldable Active Origami Reflector Antenna (AORA) of parabolic form. They used shape memory polymer (SMP) composites and applied origami principles for smooth folds to determine the shape and fold pattern of a planar […]

Nano antennas for data transfer

Science Daily  January 8, 2020 To enable antennas to operate at higher frequencies allow higher bandwidths and smaller footprints directional antennas have to be shrunk to nanometre scale. Researchers in Germany demonstrated electrically driven Yagi-Uda antennas for light with wavelength-scale footprints that exhibit large directionalities with forward-to-backward ratios of up to 9.1 dB. Light generation is achieved via antenna-enhanced inelastic tunneling of electrons over the antenna feed gap. They obtained reproducible tunnel gaps by means of feedback-controlled dielectrophoresis to precisely place single surface-passivated gold nanoparticles in the antenna gap. The resulting antennas performed equivalent to radio-frequency antennas and outperformed RF designs. […]

Analytical tool designs corkscrew-shaped nano-antennae

Science Daily  August 23, 2019 The nano corkscrews are highly sensitive to light: depending on frequency and polarisation, they can strongly enhance it. Usually, the interaction of such nano-antennas with an electromagnetic field is determined using numerical methods. Each helix geometry, however, requires a new numerically expensive calculation. Researchers in Germany have a formula that tells them how a nano-antenna with specific parameters responds to light. This analytical description can be used as a design tool, as it specifies the required geometrical parameters of a nano-helix to amplify electromagnetic fields of desired frequencies or polarisation. The research could have applications […]