A Liquid-Metal-Based Crossed-Slot Antenna With Polarization and Continuous-Frequency Reconfiguration

Abstract

Aiming to the limitations of traditional reconfigurable antennas, this paper proposes a novel reconfigurable antenna that can achieve four polarizations and continuously-tunable frequency. The proposed antenna is based on liquid metal, i.e., eutectic gallium and indium (EGaIn). The pattern of the slots can be controlled by changing the amount of the liquid metal inserted in the 3-D printed channels. The antenna can work under four polarization modes: left-hand circular polarization (LHCP), right-hand circular polarization (RHCP), and two orthogonal linear polarization (LP) modes. Under the LP modes, the working frequency of the antenna can be tuned continuously from 1.82 GHz to 2.0 GHz. The measured results agree with the simulated ones, which validate the performance of proposed antenna.

Keywords

• Continuous-frequency reconfiguration
• polarization reconfiguration
• liquid metal
• patch antenna