Vanadium oxide enables variable frequency antennae

The revolutionary antennas developed at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, in collaboration with Michigan State University, were documented in the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters in February. They are made by integrating vanadium dioxide thin films, a type of phase-change material, meaning it is an insulator at room temperature and becomes metallic when heated above 68°C. The heating-cooling cycle is repeatable and the phase-change is reversible.

Principal investigator and renowned expert Dimitris Anagnostou, Ph.D., of the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, led the research with his graduate student Tarron Teeslink, collaborating with Nelson Sepulveda, Ph.D., and his student David Torres, from Michigan State University. Anagnostou, associate professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, has been working on reconfigurable and tunable antennas for the past 15 years.

Common methods to date have resulted in non-linearities, high losses, expensive fabrication equipment and often complicated biasing mechanisms. His exploration of vanadium dioxide has shown the material can be used in linear devices, has minimal losses and can be activated using a variety of heat transfer methods.

Linear devices for RF communications applications involve usually passive components such as antennas and (microwave) filters, as well as resistors, capacitors and inductors. Often antennas are tuned or reconfigured using non-linear components such as diodes, but these distort the electrical signals, especially over a wide range of frequencies. Vanadium dioxide is a linear material, meaning it affects all radio frequencies by the same amount causing no distortion, and is therefore suitable for narrowband and wideband tuning.

Vanadium dioxide was investigated as far back as 1959, when an article described the insulator-to-metal transition at approximately 68°C. Since then, it has been almost neglected, as the need for reconfigurable components, wireless communications and antennas was not as significant. In the past decade vanadium dioxide has received widespread attention from researchers due to its properties for applications spanning from information storage to stronger artificial muscles and missile guidance. This is the only known success achieving reconfigurability by altering the antenna’s geometry with the special class of material. Several other universities are currently working in the area, indicating the strong scientific interest in this area.

“The novelty lies in obtaining the know-how of the integration and application of the material in antennas in the GHz range. There are still many things to learn. These prototype antennas prove the material is capable for use and should be further investigated,” Anagnostou said. “Our ongoing experiments in using the material for cloaking and thermal camouflage are also very encouraging.”

The National Science Foundation funded the work over three years as a collaborative proposal between South Dakota Mines and Michigan State University. While Anagnostou and Teeslink did the design and characterisation at SD Mines, Michigan State researchers fabricated the antennas at the clean room of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.