Mirzaee, Milad, et al. 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation & USNC/URSI National Radio Science Meeting.
The study explored the feasibility of utilizing conductive acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) material in producing flexible three-dimensional (3D) antennas through additive manufacturing techniques. The antenna prototype used polylactic acid (PLA) as a flexible dielectric material in red and ABS as a conductive material in black to create its different sections. Examination showed the antenna prototype to be compact in size, lightweight and mechanically flexible. The antenna demonstrated a broad bandwidth of 24.18% centered around 7.81 GHz.
Antenna Fabrication from ABS Electric Filament
· After assessing the antenna's performance with a conductive material like copper, the antenna prototype was constructed using conductive ABS instead. The fabrication utilized ABS filament with a diameter and roundness of 1.7 ± 0.1 mm, a resistance of 10,000 ohms/cm, and a printing temperature of 200-230 °C. For the substrate, flexible PLA filament was employed in a separate extruder. The printer operated using software that sliced a tessellated 3D model in STL format into layers along the Z-axis, generating G codes to guide the extruder heads to specific X-Y coordinates for filament deposition.
· Figure 3 (a) displays the constructed antenna, which has an SMA connector attached with conductive glue. Then evaluated the antenna across a broad frequency range using an E5071C network analyzer. Figure 3 (b) compares the measured performance of the conductive ABS with simulated results for copper as the conductive radiator, demonstrating that the conductive ABS achieved strong return loss from approximately 6.8 to 8.7 GHz.
