Developing flexible 3D printed antenna using conductive ABS materials

This paper presents the feasibility of conductive acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) materials in the fabrication of flexible three-dimensional (3D) antennas using additive manufacturing method. To demonstrate this application a bowtie antenna with coplanar waveguide (CPW) feed structure has been designed and measured. The prototype of the antenna has been fabricated using Makerbot® dual 3D printer and flexible polylactic acid (PLA) and ABS filaments for dielectric and conductive parts of the antenna, respectively. To our knowledge, this is the first reported antenna fabricated with conductive ABS material. The dielectric properties of the PLA and ABS filaments have been measured using Agilent performance probe. The fabricated antenna possesses compact size, light-weight and mechanically flexible structure. In addition it achieves wide bandwidth of 24.18 % at the center frequency of 7.81 GHz.