Design of SLF Magnetoelectric Antennas and Communication System Based on a Fully Coupled Multiphysics Modeling Method

This work proposes a fully coupled multiphysics modeling method to model the magneto-mechano-electric multiphysics coupling and the near-to-far electromagnetic fields’ transformation for magnetoelectric (ME) antennas. The magnetic anisotropy and hysteresis effect in the magnetostrictive material is incorporated into the modeling method. With the accurate modeling method, a bending cantilever mode ME antenna with enhanced radiation intensity is designed. A more than 95% size reduction could be realized when compared with ME antennas driven by longitudinal resonance mode. A prototype of the ME antenna with an extremely compact size of
$8.2\times 2\times 0.25$
cm3 is fabricated and measured. Measured results illustrate that the proposed antenna is able to operate in a super low frequency (SLF) of 193 Hz. It is capable of producing 37.7-nT magnetic flux density for a radiation distance of 1 m, which is several orders higher than currently reported ME antennas. To validate the data transmission capability of the ME antennas, an SLF communication system with ME antennas at the receiving and transmitting ends is developed, in which the transmission of a
$32\times 32$
pixels grayscale image is realized. The radiation-enhanced ME antenna exhibits attractive features in submarine and underground wireless communications.