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Flexible painted metasurface using conductive silver ink for scattering fields digital manipulation

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Abstract

Printed circuit board (PCB) fabrication technology has been widely used in metasurfaces in microwave domain. However, such technology still needs a non-negligible fabricating period and cost. To further explore the ultra-low-cost, convenient processing and fast demonstrating method, we present a metasurface using silver ink to produce the digital patterns for abundant scattering field manipulation. By directly painting the conductive ink on the paper to establish the specific metal structure, arbitrary EM properties can be designed, which could be regarded as a manually convenient PCB technology for metasurface fabrication. We design eight coding sequences to, respectively, generate single- and dual beam fields with different scattering angles. Simulations and measurements show good agreements, verifying the feasibility of our design method. We believe the presented metasurface processing method will promote the interests on flexible metasurface design and further stimulate related domain like wireless communication.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.62001232, 11404207), Jiangsu Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. BK20180457), SHIEP Foundation K2014-054 and Z2015-086, the Local Colleges and Universities Capacity Building Program of the Shanghai Science and Technology Committee, China (Grant Nos. 15110500900).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210094, China

    Jie Cui

  2. College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shanghai University of Electric Power, Shanghai, 200090, China

    Si Si Luo, Fu Ju Ye & Lei Chen

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  1. Jie Cui
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Correspondence to Lei Chen.

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Cui, J., Luo, S.S., Ye, F.J. et al. Flexible painted metasurface using conductive silver ink for scattering fields digital manipulation. Appl. Phys. A 127, 666 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-021-04800-6

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