Laser ablation cutting-based metal patterning technique enabling 3D-printed broadband antennas for sub-6 GHz wireless communications applications

This article introduces a novel method of laser ablation patterning-based additive manufacturing (AM) to develop a broadband planar antenna for sub-6 GHz wireless communications applications. The presented technique consists of fused deposition modeling (FDM) and the laser ablation cutting-based metal patterning. The metal layer is transferred to a thermoplastic-based ABS substrate without any postprocessing. FDM and metal patterning are independent operations in our procedure and therefore the proposed prototyping is time-efficient compared to the current AM techniques. The 3-D printed antenna is in the form of the single-layer ABS substrate-metal radiator fed by a coplanar waveguide (CPW). The antenna is also printed on an FR-4 substrate using printed circuit board (PCB) technology, and the radiation skills of the 3-D printed antenna are benchmarked with its PCB counterpart. The numerical results obtained with a full-wave analysis tool are verified by the experimental results. The proposed antenna operates on a broadband covering 2.54-5.84-GHz band with the peak gain around 4 dBi and meets the requirements of the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) and wireless local area network (WLAN) band applications. The fabricated 3D-printed antenna is loaded to human body, and the reflection coefficients are measured for off-body communication links. The calculated electromagnetic power density profiles on the human phantom are demonstrated for various operating frequencies.