3d Printed Electrically Small Planar Inverted-F Antenna Efficiency Improvement Through Voluminous Expansion

An electrically small inverted-F antenna is designed, as a planar 2D antenna, and subsequently extended to a 3D profile to study the effects of voluminous expansion on the antenna's gain and efficiency. 3D prototypes will be fabricated using two different additive manufacturing methods to compare and contrast the strengths of each, and benchmarked against 2D additive printed and standard lithographic fabricated samples. Simulation results show an improvement in the antenna gain from -14.0 dB to -5.6 dB from planar to 3D.