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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: 2) by VLM on Friday September 28 2018, @06:55PM
Conductive paint is some decades old for EMI-RFI suppression and you won't really enjoy the price. You can get tiny little bottles of higher quality paint for repairing car rear window defrosters at a price per mL that would make a printer ink mfgr blush. I vaguely recall ham radio guys discussing this for antenna screwing around (hams love to screw around with antennas) and needless to say given the price of paint this kind of research project is much more affordable for 70cm band than 160M band.
There's also some madness related to very large waveguide and radio telescope horn antennas. If you don't care how long it lasts, foil backed insulation electrically connected with spray conductive paint works, but how do you find paint that doesn't melt the styrofoam?