Additively manufactured artificial materials with metallic meta‐atoms

Abstract

This study presents the analysis and fabrication of artificial materials with metallic cuboid inclusions (termed here as meta-atoms) in a dielectric host material. These synthetic materials or metamaterials have been additively manufactured with a fused deposition modelling three-dimensional (3D) printer. The effective permittivity and permeability have been numerically analysed using the Maxwell-Garnett and Lewin's approximation. Simulations and measurements have shown good agreement with analytical calculations. The anisotropy of the heterogeneous mixture due to the orientation of the meta-atoms has been demonstrated. The effective permittivity has been increased by the presence of the meta-atoms, which has the potential of producing 3D-printing metamaterials with tailored electromagnetic properties.

Meta-Atom Loaded Patch Antenna

“…and the equations used to calculate the dimensions are given by Balanis [5]. The antenna is designed on a 2mm thick substrate of PLA (Polylactic acid) which has a relative permittivity of 2.6 and a loss tangent of 0.009 [6]. For a patch antenna designed at 2.5GHz this gives width of 36.3mm and a patch length of 44.7mm.…”

Multi-material additive manufacturing of low sintering temperature Bi2Mo2O9ceramics with Ag floating electrodes by selective laser burnout

“…Low temperature co-fired ceramics (LTCC) applications include wireless telecommunication, electronic warfare, satellite broadcasting, and intelligent transport systems (Ziolkowski 2003;Parke et al 2015;Sebastian, Wang, and Jantunen 2016;Zhang, Whittow, and Vardaxoglou 2017;Wang et al 2018;Zhou et al 2019;Faouri et al 2019). The growth of the mobile phone market in the 1990s led to extensive research and development in temperature stable, medium permittivity dielectric ceramics with applications such as resonators in filters for microwave (MW) communications.…”

“…Artificial dielectrics and metamaterials have extraordinary properties and can control electromagnetic (EM) wave propagation and tailoring EM properties (Zhang, Whittow, and Vardaxoglou 2017). Currently, manufacturing of metamaterials is costly and time consuming as several processes are required such as micromachining, etching and assembling (Ziolkowski 2003;Parke et al 2015;Walia et al 2015).…”

Near-Field Microwave Imaging using a Polarimetric Array of 3D Printed Antennas and Lenses

“…The range of dielectric values obtained by this 3D printing technique can introduce constraints on lens thickness. Recent efforts [3], [4] have investigated 3D printing metal particles and dielectrics. These artificial dielectrics are reported to have larger dielectric value permitting construction of thinner lenses.…”