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Everything is getting smaller and even wearable, so traditional antennas are less practical than ever. You’ve probably seen PCB antennas on things like ESP8266s, but Drexel University researchers are now studying using titanium carbide — known as MXene — to build thin, light, and even transparent antennas that outperform copper antennas. Bucking the trend for 3D printing, these antennas are sprayed like ink or paint onto a surface.
A traditional antenna that uses metal carries most of the current at the skin (something we’ve discussed before). For example, at WiFi frequencies, a copper antenna’s skin depth is about 1.33 micrometers. That means that antennas have to be at least thick enough to carry current at that depth from all surfaces –practically 5 micrometers is about the thinnest you can reasonably go. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you are trying to make something thin and flexible, it is pretty thick. Using MXene, the researchers made antennas as thin as 100 nanometers thick — that’s 10% of a micrometer and only 2% of a conventional antenna.
I'm looking forward to networked graffiti.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday September 28 2018, @06:51PM (1 child)
I have a printed out old fashioned paper "paper" regarding printed antennas for RFID use, interesting but I can't find it.
It seems like there's a lot of papers from a couple years ago on this topic, maybe it was this one
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7413586 [ieee.org]
I vaguely recall ham radio stuff like quarter wave verticals for 440 MHz made using that conductive ink for repairing rear window defrosters, but google finds nothing. It doesn't seem like rocket surgery, epoxy some RG-58 coax to your old truck window to hold it in place, then draw a vertical antenna and maybe some radial groundplanes or go full on half wave dipole like a civilized RF emitter. I suspect this would work great for a 5 watt ht making short transmissions but melt the ink off the window for a 50 watt mobile transmitter.
(Score: 1) by Some call me Tim on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:20AM
I also remember that ink, but I wouldn't want an antenna on the window right behind my head. That's what the passenger side is for ;-)
Questioning science is how you do science!