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Bendable Antennas For Flexible ElectronicsUpdate: This story is now available in Chinese on our sister site MaterialsViewsChina.com.The original research paper behind this article is now free to access! The traditional antenna has long held the title of “most irritating component” for scores of electronic engineers working to build more smaller and more durable devices. Remember having to pull the aerial out of your original cell phone, or unexpectedly and rather terminally losing radio signal going through the carwash? Things have moved on a little since then, but the next big step could be just around the corner; in new work, a team of researchers from North Carolina State University have reported the development of a flexible, liquid-based antenna that is cheap to construct and can be twisted, stretched, bent, and even cut without failing. To develop this device, a conductive fluid metal alloy was injected into microchannels embedded in a flexible silicone strip; the two channels of metal acted like an old-fashioned dipole antenna, acting with high efficiency over a broad frequency range. The oxidation properties of the alloy also permitted self-healing in the antenna structure; if the flexible body was cut, an oxide skin formed around the opening, not only preventing the metal from spilling out, but also maintaining conductivity, keeping the device functioning. You won’t be seeing these in your new phone or wireless router just yet, but their potentially cheap construction, durability through self-healing, flexibility (literally and otherwise!), and high efficiency means I doubt that we've seen the last of them. /am
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