Kirigami Cuts Turn a Sheet of MXene-Printed Plastic Into a Reconfigurable Microwave Antenna

Researchers from the University of British Columbia and Drexel University have turned to kirigami, the ancient art of paper-cutting and origami's lesser-known sibling, for the future of wireless communication — by using the art for a novel tunable antenna made with titanium carbide MXene ink.

"For wireless technology to support advancements in fields like soft robotics and aerospace, antennas need to be designed for tunable performance and with ease of fabrication," says Yury Gogotsi, PhD and co-author of the paper detailing the team's creation. "Kirigami is a natural model for a manufacturing process, due to the simplicity with which complex 3D forms can be created from a single 2D piece of material."

Traditionally, antennas are tuned in two ways: electronically or by adjusting their size or shape. Doing so in-the-field, though, is a challenge, and can lead to bulky and complex designs — something the team's highly-adjustable antenna, made from a sheet of acetate printed with conductive MXene ink and cut in a specific pattern, aims to solve.

"Frequency selective surfaces, like these antennas, are periodic structures that selectively transmit, reflect, or absorb electromagnetic waves at specific frequencies," explains co-lead Mohammad Zarifi. "They have active and/or passive structures and are commonly used in applications such as antennas, radomes, and reflectors to control wave propagation direction in wireless communication at 5G and beyond platforms."

The antennas designed by team can be tuned by simple adjusting the tension under which the sheet is held — causing the parallel kirigami cuts to open up and pop up specially-shaped resonators. As the tension shifts, the angle of the resonators change allowing for quick tuning. The same technique, the researchers say, can also be applied to co-planar resonators used as a frequency source — rather than sink — with a prototype showing a 400MHz shift as the tension was adjusted with the suggestion that it could be used as a strain sensor for infrastructure monitoring.

"Our goal here was to simultaneously improve the adjustability of antenna performance as well as create a simple manufacturing process for new microwave components by incorporating a versatile MXene nanomaterial with kirigami-inspired designs," adds co-author Omid Niksan, PhD. "The next phase of this research will explore new materials and geometries for the antennas."

The team's work has been published under open-access terms in the journal Nature Communications.