Design and Evaluation of MXene-Based Patch Antenna for Strain Sensing Applications: A promising Cyber Physical System Technology

This paper presents a novel antenna design for strain-sensing applications operating at 3.5 GHz. The proposed antenna design is based on a conventional circular patch antenna using a polyimide substrate having dielectric constant of 3.5 and thickness of 0.1 mm. The overall dimension of the antenna is $30 \mathrm{x}28\mathrm{x}0.1\mathrm{m}\mathrm{m}^{3}$. The antenna is initially designed with various conducting materials such as Aluminium, Copper, Gold & Silver as a patch to study their effect on antenna performance. Further, MXene is deployed as the conducting patch material which shows excellent performance when compared to other conducting materials. Additionally, the study also investigates the impact of varying thicknesses of MXene on the antenna’s parameters. The results reveal that increasing the thickness of MXene enhances the antenna’s performance. The reflection co-efficient was found to be -25.6dB when MXene of thickness 50 microns was used. Similarly, other antenna parameters such as VSWR, Gain, Directivity, Efficiency and Radiation characteristics are studied. The results show that MXene-coated patch antennas could be used as potential design in Cyber Physical System solutions especially for strain sensing applications.