Department of Systems Engineering, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR 72204, USA.
Nanotechnology. 2010 Jan 29;21(4):045301. doi: 10.1088/0957-4484/21/4/045301. Epub 2009 Dec 10.
A novel application that utilizes conductive patches composed of purified multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) embedded in a sodium cholate composite thin film to create microstrip antennas operating in the microwave frequency regime is proposed. The MWCNTs are suspended in an adhesive solvent to form a conductive ink that is printed on flexible polymer substrates. The DC conductivity of the printed patches was measured by the four probe technique and the complex relative permittivity was measured by an Agilent E5071B probe. The commercial software package, CST Microwave Studio (MWS), was used to simulate the proposed antennas based on the measured constitutive parameters. An excellent agreement of less than 0.2% difference in resonant frequency is shown. Simulated and measured results were also compared against identical microstrip antennas that utilize copper conducting patches. The proposed MWCNT-based antennas demonstrate a 5.6% to 2.2% increase in bandwidth, with respect to their corresponding copper-based prototypes, without significant degradation in gain and/or far-field radiation patterns.
提出了一种新颖的应用，利用嵌入在胆酸钠复合薄膜中的纯化多壁碳纳米管 (MWCNT) 组成的导电贴片来创建工作在微波频率范围内的微带天线。MWCNT 悬浮在粘性溶剂中形成导电油墨，然后将其印刷在柔性聚合物基底上。通过四探针技术测量印刷贴片的直流电导率，通过安捷伦 E5071B 探头测量复介电常数。商用软件包 CST 微波工作室 (MWS) 用于根据测量的本构参数模拟所提出的天线。在谐振频率方面，显示出小于 0.2%差异的极好一致性。还将模拟和测量结果与使用铜导电贴片的相同微带天线进行了比较。与相应的铜基原型相比，所提出的基于 MWCNT 的天线的带宽增加了 5.6%至 2.2%，而增益和/或远场辐射模式没有明显下降。
