Semitransparent and Flexible Mechanically Reconfigurable Electrically Small Antennas Based on Tortuous Metallic Micromesh

A novel optically transparent, flexible, and mechanically reconfigurable zeroth-order resonant (ZOR) antenna using stretchable micromesh structure is presented in this paper. The size reduction of the antenna is achieved by using the ZOR property, and the uniform metallic patches of the antenna are replaced with the tortuous micromesh. The tortuous micromesh structures provide a high degree of freedom for stretching when encapsulated in elastomeric polymers with added feature of semitransparency. Accordingly, the structure can undergo mechanical deformation such as stretching (up to 40%), folding, or twisting without breakage. The resonant frequency of the antennas is linearly reconfigurable from 2.94 to 2.46 GHz upon stretching.