All-printed, flexible, reconfigurable frequency selective surfaces

Abstract

We demonstrate a new fully printed, conformal, band-pass frequency selective surface (FSS) utilizing a novel interdigitated capacitor (IDC), in which the space between the fingers can be filled with dielectric materials with different dielectric constants. Every dielectric constant corresponds to a different resonance frequency for the FSS, leading to a bandpass performance that can be tuned in a static manner based on the dielectric choice. The 2-D FSS consists of a periodic array of non-resonant and subwavelength structures (i.e., a metallic square loop and a wire grid) printed on either side of a flexible polyimide film using direct-ink writing methodologies. The miniaturized-element nature of this metamaterial-inspired FSS results in localized frequency-selective properties with very low sensitivity to the angle of incidence. Moreover, its symmetric design makes it polarization independent. A multiphase barium strontium titanate/cyclic olefin copolymer (BST/COC) composite with two different BST loadings, corresponding to two different dielectric constants, is the dielectric ink that is printed on the IDCs to vary the resonance frequency of the FSS. Different models of the FSS involving various IDC designs, with a first-order bandpass response at X-band, were simulated, printed, and measured. The center frequency of the template FSS with the air-filled IDC was tuned by 4.52% and 21.08% from 9.96 GHz by printing BST/COC dielectrics with different BST loadings on the IDCs. Moreover, the operation mode of the FSS was switched from a first order filter to a dual-band filter using printed BST/COC ink in a novel FSS design.