Printed Graphene Antennas and Systems for RFID Applications

Abstract

Graphene is claimed to be the wonder material that could potentially redefine our future technologies. The reason behind this is that graphene possesses outstanding electronic and mechanical properties. These unique properties could improve or reinvent a vast variety of applications that used every day in our life. For many years, most researches were focusing on fundamental physics and properties of the graphene. The progress of graphene has been quicker than other comparable materials although a lot of the most exciting areas of graphene science are still in the early stages. This thesis mainly focuses on the research of the realization of Radio Frequency (RF) graphene based wireless applications. To begin with, the tunability of graphene is utilized to design graphene based attenuator, single and multi-frequency reconfigurable antennas. These works show the feasibility of applying monolayer graphene sheet into RF applications and antenna designs. In addition to that, graphene conductive ink was made utilizing graphene flakes as base material and to make this screen printed material vastly more conductive by compression technique. This technique is low-cost and efficient, and the printed samples are flexible and environmental friendly. This thesis also presents the design and ministration of Ultra high frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) antenna, Near Field Communication (NFC) Antennas based on printed graphene technology. The pioneering experiments on printed graphene show this technology can significantly reduce the cost for RFID applications thanks to a much simpler process and lower material cost. Furthermore, the fundamental experiments on Graphene Oxide (GO) dielectric properties in GHz are applied in RF enabled humidity sensor and Wireless Graphene Security Networks extends the possibilities of applying printed graphene technology into internet of things (IoT) and wireless communication applications.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Robin Sloan (Supervisor) & Zhirun Hu (Supervisor)