Design and characterisation of a screen-printed millimetre-wave flexible metasurface using copper ink for communication applications

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, the design, fabrication and characterisation of metasurfaces with the anisotropic response for millimetre waves (MMW) has been presented for seamless, secure and low-loss high-frequency communication. Two frequency bands, 29 GHz and 60 GHz, have been selected for the development of efficient, cost-effective and broadband metasurfaces constituting an octa-armed star-shaped structure and a symmetric dual orthogonally I-shaped structure, respectively. Low-cost and high-performance nanoscale printing inks and pastes have been deployed in the screen-printing technique to perform the fabrication of designed metasurfaces on flexible films. Electromagnetic (EM) characteristics of the proposed metasurfaces are evaluated using state-of-the-art testing facilities to demonstrate their potential performance attributes in wave-propagation at MMW for high data rate communication links.