Abstract
ABSTRACT Liquid-phase exfoliated graphene sheets are promising candidates for printing electronics. Here, a high-performance printed 2.4 GHz graphene-based antenna is reported. Graphene conductive ink prepared by using liquid-phase exfoliation process is printed onto a water-transferable paper by using blade printing technique, which is then patterned as dipole antenna and transferred onto a target substrate. The fabricated dipole antenna (43 × 3 mm), exhibiting typical radiation patterns of an ideal dipole antenna, achieves −10 dB bandwidth of 8.9% and a maximum gain of 0.7 dBi. The printed graphene-antennas satisfy the application requirements of the Internet of Things and suggest its feasibility of replacing conventional metallic antennas in those applications.
Highlights
Printed electronics have attracted great interest in recent years [1,2,3,4]
As many Internet of Things (IoT) protocols such as 802.15.4 (Zigbee, Thread), Bluetooth, and ANT operate at 2.4 GHz, our dipole antenna is designed to operate at this frequency
Different from previous reports on directly printing graphene ink on a flat substrate, our process composed of the printing of graphene ink onto a watertransferrable paper and a transferring of the printed graphene layer is suitable for the fabrication of graphene antenna onto an arbitrary substrate, flat substrates, and 3D and uneven objects (Figure 1(c))
Summary
Printed electronics have attracted great interest in recent years [1,2,3,4]. It has a wide range of applications, such as antennas [5,6,7,8], transparent electrodes [9,10,11], solar cells [12,13,14], thin-film transistors [15,16,17], and light-emitting devices [18,19,20]. The development of graphene exfoliation techniques from graphite in recent years makes it possible to produce graphene-based inks in large scale and at low cost [28,29], which is necessary for mass production of printed electronics. The reported graphene-based antennas mostly worked at megahertz frequencies (MHz), which indicates that they had a size scale of decimeters [7,8,30,31,32]. This is too large for portable devices. Such performance of our antenna satisfies its potential applications in the field of IoT
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