Development of a Flexible Metamaterial Film with High EM Wave Absorptivity by Numerical and Experimental Methods

Abstract

The present study is intended to develop and test a cost-effective and efficient printing method for fabricating flexible metamaterial film with high electromagnetic wave absorptivity. The film can be easily applied to the surfaces with curved aspects. Firstly, numerical parametric study of the absorption characteristics of the film is performed for the range of frequency varying from 2.0 to 9.0 GHz based on commercial software package. Secondly, the flexible metamaterial films are fabricated, and experiments are conducted. The flexible metamaterial film consists of a flexible dielectric film made of polyimide (PI) and an array of split-ring resonators. The split-ring resonators of different geometric dimensions are fabricated on the PI film surface by using a silver nanoparticles ink jet printer. The performance of the flexible structure is then measured and dependence of operation frequency with higher absorptivity on the dimensions of the split-ring resonators is investigated. A comparison between the numerical and experimental data shows that the numerical predictions of the operation frequency with higher absorptivity closely agree with the experimental data.

Microwave Resonators for Wearable Sensors Design: A Systematic Review

“…In Figure 11a, an inkjet-printed array of SRRs is fabricated on a commercial polyimide substrate using a commercial silver nanoparticle dispersion and conductive polymer inks. Similarly, in [133], a flexible metamaterial PI film is fully inkjet printed with an array of silver rectangle-shaped SRR resonators with the objective of reaching high electromagnetic wave absorptivity. In the article, a parametric study is performed to obtain the dependence of the absorptivity on frequency at specific geometrical dimensions of the model.…”

“…Figure 11 exposes the unit cell design (c1) and the bended prototype (c2). array on flexible metamaterial PI film [133]: layout (b1) and prototypes (b2); (c1,c2) inkjet-printed MSRR unit cell array on a very low-cost photo paper [135]: combined SRR and CLS unit cell (c1) and bended prototype (c2). Over the recent two decades, the interest in the usage of textile-based wearable devices for on-body applications has significantly increased, especially in the health monitoring and biomedical fields.…”