Outstanding Radiation Performance of an All-carbon Nanotube Patch
- PDF / 321,307 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 432 x 648 pts Page_size
- 50 Downloads / 173 Views
Outstanding Radiation Performance of an All-carbon Nanotube Patch David W. Stollberg1, Fabio Urbani2, Amit Verma3 Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332, U.S.A. 2 Department of Engineering, The University of Texas at Brownsville, Brownsville, TX 78520, USA 3 Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Texas A&M UniversityKingsville, Kingsville, TX 78363, USA 1
ABSTRACT: We report the fabrication and characterization of a microstrip patch antenna composed entirely out of multi-walled carbon nanotubes on a silicon substrate. The antenna showed excellent response in the X-band, for which it was designed. In addition, an observed left-shift resonance effect points towards significant potential for miniaturization. The antenna also showed very promising reliability under different operating conditions. Such antennas may therefore have significant promise for system-on-chip, space application, and other specialized applications.
INTRODUCTION: The last several years have seen a significant interest in carbon nanotubes (CNTs) for antenna applications.1-6 In particular such applications show great potential for the utilization of CNTs as antennas for the terahertz (THz) or infrared (IR) operations. However the use of these dimensionally challenged materials for lower frequency applications, such as microwaves and millimeter-waves, which constitute a significant portion of commercial and specialized antenna applications, has not been exhaustively explored. Within those frequency bands, microstrip antennas (MSA) have proved to be excellent radiators for many applications. Aircraft and ship antennas, satellite communications, mobile radio, and biomedical are just few of the application areas of such devices. MSAs have several advantages compared with conventional microwave antenna such as a lower weight, ease of integration with other microwave integrated circuits, and multiband operations. On the other hand, MSAs also show several disadvantages compared to other microwave radiators, such as narrow bandwidth, and lower gain and power handling capability. Many research groups are currently undertaking an effort to overcome the above mentioned issues, and improve the performance of MSAs by using non-conventional materials such as double-negative materials (DNG).7-9 Recent experimental results performed on MSA, by placing vertical multiwall carbon nanotube arrays on the patch surface, demonstrated enhancement of the electromagnetic radiation of the antenna.10. These results indicate the potential of using CNTs for improving performance of an MSA. In this paper we present characterization results on a MSA utilizing an all-multi-wall CNTs (MWCNTs) forest as a patch on a silicon substrate. The following sections discuss the antenna design, fabrication, and experimental characterization.
181
ANTENNA DESIGN: The antenna was designed to operate in the X-band (8-12 GHz). This design was undertaken after simulating a model antenna using the Finite Element (FEM) softwa
Data Loading...
