Manufacturability Study for Flexible Printed RF Elements

Significant effort has been expended into the advancement of flexible, additively manufactured (AM) electronic systems. Less well studied are the effects of additively manufactured RF elements such as antennas, waveguides, and their required interconnects. Primarily, with respect to AM RF elements there is insufficient engineering data to rationally choose the ink materials and substrates and corresponding AM production process to predict the resulting RF and thermal system performance. There is an unmet need for the characterization of the RF performance of additively manufactured antennas and wave guides using additively produced conductors on various flexible substrate types and an unmet need for known-good antenna using only non-destructive characterization. In Phase II, utilizing the materials and techniques developed in Phase I, we will prototype and demonstrate its ability to meet the program requirements defined as (1) Produce test coupons in quantities established in Phase I. (2) Determine void sizes and densities in the material sets test coupons. (3) Conduct a characterization test plan on all test coupons at -40°C, 25°C, and 125°C with power levels of 1W, 25W, and 50W. Traditional evaluation methods such as destructive testing of samples at high power are not applicable due to small batch sizes and inconsistency of performance, so a new evaluation technique is needed. One aim of this project is to produce optimized ink/substrate pairing for optimal printed RF performances, including conformal printing. Another aim of this project is an improved predictive evaluation of AM printed electronic systems using Machine Learning (ML) image classification from optical profilometry output and other non-destructive test methods. Specifically, we focus on fundamental analysis of additive electronics for DC or RF applications. Another aim of this project is to develop temperature-compensating antennas that will lead to more reliable RF performance at higher temperatures encountered in MDA and DOD (e.g., hypersonic) applications. Approved for Public Release | 22-MDA-11102 (22 Mar 22)