Functional plastic films: nano-engineered composite based flexible microwave antennas with near-unity relative visible transmittance

Abstract

Microwave antennas are essential elements for various applications, such as telecommunication, radar, sensing, and wireless power transport. These antennas are conventionally manufactured on rigid substrates using opaque materials, such as metal strips, metallic tapes, or epoxy pastes; thus, prohibiting their use in flexible and wearable devices, and simultaneously limiting their integration into existing optoelectronic systems. Here, we demonstrate that mechanically flexible and optically transparent microwave antennas with high operational efficiencies can be readily fabricated using composite nanolayers deposited on common plastic substrates. The composite nanolayer structure consists of an ultra-thin copper-doped silver film sandwiched between two dielectric films of tantalum pentoxide and aluminum oxide. The material and thickness of each constituent layer are judiciously selected such that the whole structure exhibits an experimentally measured averaged visible transmittance as high as 98.94% compared to a bare plastic substrate, and simultaneously, a sheet resistance as low as 12.5 Ω/sq. Four representative types of microwave antennas are implemented: an omnidirectional dipole antenna, unidirectional Yagi-Uda antenna, low-profile patch antenna, and Fabry-Pérot cavity antenna. These devices exhibit great mechanical flexibility with bending angle over 70°, high gain of up to 13.6 dBi, and large radiation efficiency of up to 84.5%. The proposed nano-engineered composites can be easily prepared over large areas on various types of substrates and simultaneously overcome the limitations of poor mechanical flexibility, low electrical conductivity, and reduced optical transparency usually faced by other constituent materials for flexible transparent microwave antennas. The demonstrated flexible microwave antennas have various applications ranging from fifth-generation and vehicular communication systems to bio-signal monitors and wearable electronics.

Keywords

• optically transparent antenna
• flexible microwave antenna
• transparent conductor
• ultra-thin silver
• doped silver
• wearable optoelectronics