Electromagnetic characterisation of conductive 3D-Printable filaments for designing fully 3D-Printed antennas

Additive manufacturing (AM) 3D-printing technology is increasingly bringing benefits even in electromagnetics, with interesting prospects of application. Apart from the use of additive manufacturing for realising dielectric components of suitably shaped antennas, the ambitious target is, undoubtedly, the fully 3D realisation of radiofrequency and microwave circuits as well as radiating structures, including, therefore, conductive parts. In this regard, 3D-printable filaments with interesting conductive properties are being produced. However, their rigorous conductivity characterisation is still missing, making it difficult to estimate the real behaviour of the final 3D printed electromagnetic device. To fill this gap, the conductivity of one of the most interesting conductive filaments, named Electrifi, is first experimentally evaluated in a frequency range as large as 0.72-6 GHz, accounting also for its roughness. Then it has been validated by designing, realising, and testing three fully 3D-printed antennas. Specifically, two bow-tie antennas, operating at 2.8 and 4 GHz, respectively, and an ultrawideband antenna, borrowed from the existing literature, operating between 1 and 7 GHz. The good agreement between simulated and measured results demonstrates the reliability of the performed electrical conductivity characterisation, even in the design of efficient radiating structures entirely realised with thermoplastic materials with copper nanoparticle additives

Designing UHF RFID tag antennas with Barcode shape for dual-technology identification

In this paper, a novel methodology to design Ultra High Frequency Radio-Frequency IDentification (UHF RFID) tag antennas with Barcode layout is proposed with the challenging goal of "fusing" both technologies in a single device. Specifically, after a brief recall of the well-known barcode standard, a procedure to design meandered barcode-shaped UHF RFID tags is introduced and discussed leveraging on electromagnetic evidence. The main steps of the proposed method are described by highlighting the constraints inherited by both the adopted technologies, as well as the useful opportunities to automatise the entire antenna design process after a preliminary simulation campaign through a full-wave simulator. Different RFID-Barcode tag antennas are designed, manufactured, and characterised in terms of maximum reading range and tag sensitivity. Obtained results demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach

Recent Activities in Rfid Applications Empowered by 3D Printing at UniSalento

RFID continues to offer exciting possibilities for numerous activities, both of mere application of the technology as well as of advanced research. This paper is focused on the research activities developed in the past couple of years at the University of Salento, where RFID technology has been studied since when the UHF band was licensed.In particular, this paper deals with the sole activities linked to 3D printing in RFID, with evidence of recent advances in the state of the art which have enabled, among the others, themes ranging from fully-3D-printed RFID tags, free-form-factor flexible substrates for platform-tolerant tags, and Dielectric Resonator Antennas (DRAs) for higher frequency RFID-inspired backscattering communication

3D Printing of Antenna Conductive Elements through Fused Filament Techniques

3D printing technologies are becoming more and more appealing to easily realize prototypal devices, even in the field of the electromagnetic applications. In this framework, fused filament fabrication is one of the most used because of its cost effectiveness, but recently, even for the novel possibility of printing both dielectric and conductive elements, by using new 3D-printable nanocomposite filaments with inclusions of conductive particles. Nevertheless, a lot of possible criticalities can be experimented by the electromagnetic engineer who try to successfully exploit this technology for the described purpose. For this reason, in this paper a real case study has been deeply described, analyzing different possible strategies to develop an effective and working antenna prototype, using the so called Electrifi filament. This work aims to be a brief but detailed guide to the interested reader who needs to achieve a successful print, realizing a working 3D-printed device