Electrically Reconfigurable Metasurfaces for Frequency Selective Transmission via IPMC Kirigami

Metasurface with programmable configurations has attracted tremendous attention due to their exotic abilities to manipulate electromagnetic waves. Herein, an electrically reconfigurable metasurface for frequency selective transmission is developed based on ionic polymer-metal composite (IPMC) kirigami. First, low-voltage driven IPMC actuators with stable actuation performance are realized, and then a thermomechanical equivalent model and a numerical electromagnetic analysis model are proposed for evaluating the deformation of the IPMC actuators and predicting the electromagnetic tunable properties of the IPMC kirigami metasurfaces, respectively. Subsequently, large-area IPMC kirigami metasurfaces are proposed and produced by using programmable nanosecond laser micro-processing technique that endows the uniformity of the kirigami units. Finally, the electromagnetic functionalities of these IPMC kirigami metasurfaces are researched and validated by experiments and numerical simulations. Both theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that the electromagnetic transmission frequency of the fabricated IPMC kirigami metasurface with 10 x 10 units can be tuned from 19.3 to 20.8 GHz by the application of a low voltage of 3 V. Compared with the existing reconfigurable metasurfaces, the proposed IPMC kirigami metasurface demonstrates clear advantages in its compact structure, lower driving-voltage, low-acoustic noise, and wide working frequency range.