WSU team develops AM antenna arrays for flexible wireless systems
Researchers at Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, USA, have reported in Nature Communications on the manufacture of flexible antenna arrays produced via Additive Manufacturing, chip-sized processors, and a copper nanoparticle ink developed by the University of Maryland and Boeing.
“This proof-of-concept prototype paves the way for future smart textiles, drone or aircraft communications, edge sensing, and other rapidly evolving fields that require robust, flexible, and high-performance wireless systems,” stated Sreeni Poolakkal, co-first author on the paper and a PhD student in WSU’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Because of their materials and manufacturing methods, flexible wireless systems have often been too expensive to make and haven’t performed as well as standard antenna arrays. In cases such as wearable electronics or aeroplane wings, the movement or vibration can cause the antennas to change shape, resulting in signal errors.
The WSU-led team used Additive Manufacturing and an ink made from copper nanoparticles to create antennas that remain stable when they are bent or exposed to high humidity, temperature variations, and salt. The team’s collaborators from the University of Maryland and Boeing developed the copper nanoparticle-based ink.
“The ink is a very important part in additive, or 3D, printing,” said Subhanshu Gupta, associate professor in the WSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a co-author on the work. “The nanoparticle-based ink developed by our collaborators is actually very powerful in improving the performance for high-end communication circuits like what we’re doing.”
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Because precision wireless communication needs significant fidelity, the researchers also developed a processor chip that can correct errant signals from the antenna in real time.
“We used this processor that we developed to correct for these material deformities in the 3D printed antenna, and it also corrects for any vibrations that we see,” explained Gupta. “The ability to do that in real time makes it very attractive. We were able to achieve robust, real-time beam stabilisation for the arrays, something that was not possible before.”
The researchers built and tested a lightweight, flexible array of four antennas able to send and receive signals successfully when the antennas were moving and bending. The small antennas use low power and can easily be scaled, making them ideal for implementation on devices. Gupta explained that because they’re built as tiles, the array design enables building larger arrays, and individual processor chips on each of the tiles operate independently. The researchers were able to put together four of the antenna arrays to make sixteen total antennas.
‘Dynamic beam-stabilized, additive-printed flexible antenna arrays with on-chip rapid insight generation’ is available here.
