An Optically Transparent Magnetoelectric Dipole Antenna Design by Integrating Flexible Transparent Metal Mesh Film on Glass

An optically transparent magnetoelectric (ME) dipole antenna with a stable broadside radiation pattern over a wide impedance bandwidth is presented. It is constructed by integrating flexible transparent metal mesh film (TMMF) with low-loss quartz glass to form a transparent 3-D radiating structure. Compared with the conventional 2-D fabrication method by directly printing/bonding a 2-D planar structured TMMF on the glass surface, the proposed method can provide an improved radiation performance without sacrificing compactness and low-profile features and increase the degree of design freedom for transparent antennas. An antenna element working at 5 GHz is designed and fabricated. Experimentally, the antenna element has a relative impedance bandwidth of about 42.3% and a peak realized gain of 4.8dBi. It offers a measured optical transparency in the visible light spectrum (400–800 nm) of about 51%–82%. A <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4\times 4$ </tex-math></inline-formula> 2-D planar array excited by a parallel 1-to-16 power divider is built and measured with a realized gain of 11.1–13.2 dBi over the operating band.