Introducing Inkjet Printing Technology to the Fabrication of Flat-Layered Meta-Lens Antennas

This paper presents for the first time the additive manufacturing using inkjet printing processes to construct flat-layered metamaterial lenses. In previous work, the metamaterial patterns on the lens layers were produced using an etching approach on commercially available dielectric copper-clad substrates. In this paper, the meta-lens consists of metamaterial square-rings that are inkjet-printed on ultra-thin dielectric layers of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) using silver nanoparticle ink. The metamaterial square-ring units of variable sizes are distributed on the thin dielectric layers to satisfy the required refractive index distribution. Simulation results of a 12 cm lens operating at 13.4 GHz demonstrate the collimating features of the proposed lens.