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, Informative) by KilroySmith on Friday September 28 2018, @09:02PM
That would imply that the US National Electric Code is incorrect when it specifies the ampacity of wire based on cross-sectional area, not on circumference of the conductors.
AWG 10 wire has the same cross-sectional area regardless of whether it's solid or stranded, even though the stranded version has roughly 5 times the circumference of the solid version. Fusing current is about 333A for AWG 10 wire; why don't you try running 5 times that through a stranded AWG10 and see what happens?
I suggest learning a bit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect [wikipedia.org]