Additive manufacturing of fractal antenna for electronics applications

Abstract

Modern electronics device requires miniaturization and advanced functionality. Fractal antenna is one of the current research for such requirement. A fractal antenna is an antenna with fragmented geometry that has the characteristics of self similarity, which means, each part of the geometry is a smaller version of the original geometry. This self-similarity will increase the perimeter of antenna geometry that can receive or transmit electromagnetic radiation. Compare to conventional antenna, fractal antenna take less area due to the many contours of the shape while keeping high radiation efficiency and multi bandwidth. However, fabrication of fractal geometry is a difficult task due to the complexity associated with it. In this work, the Additive manufacturing process is proposed for the fabrication of these complex shape fractal antennas. Fabricated fractal geometry is tested on the VNA network to measure the reflection and transmission. From the experimentation, it is observed that the reflective coefficient of additive manufactured fractal antenna is -16.87 which is in the acceptable range for the commercial electronic device. In addition, experimental result is also validated by simulation using electromagnetic simulation software CST studio.