Microstrip Tunable Antenna Based on Commercial Graphene Nanoplatelets

This paper presents a tunable antenna with frequency reconfigurability caused by an external bias voltage. The antenna is composed of a patch with two stubs and commercial graphene nanoplatelets deposited in designated gaps between the antenna and the stubs. As the graphene nanoplatelets are biased with a dc voltage, their sheet resistance is varied causing a change in the reactance at the radiating edge of the patch antenna resulting in a variation of the resonant frequency. Even though commercial graphene nanoplatelets bearing higher sheet resistance are deployed yet the prototype is designed to provide comparable frequency shift to tunable antennas based on lab grown graphene flakes. Simulated values of return loss are compared to measured values. The resulting shift in the frequency is 370MHz at a frequency of 5GHz.