ALICANTE, 28 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Technological Institute of Children’s Products and Leisure (AIJU) participates in the development of a “novel method” to manufacture high-frequency devices through additive manufacturing. The development of these new antennas has demonstrated their “ability to adapt” to the specific requirements and needs of the market.
These results have been achieved within the framework of the CAFTAM project, a research project funded by the Valencian Innovation Agency (AVI), led by the Institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications (ITEAM) of the UPV, and in which a multidisciplinary team participates. formed by AIJU, the CSIC through the Institute of Chemical Technology (ITQ) and the company Dismuntel, as indicated by the technological institute for children’s products in a statement.
The promoter of the idea and coordinator of the project at ITEAM, Carmen Bachiller, explained that additive manufacturing with metallized polymer materials allows the production of “a multitude of communications devices.” In this case, she pointed out that they have developed “high-performance antennas that work exactly the same as those obtained with traditional technologies (milling metal blocks) but that are much lighter.”
“In addition, additive manufacturing allows us to create structures that traditional manufacturing does not allow at a reasonable price, so researchers are much freer when making decisions about our designs, since the limitations we had in the past, with additive manufacturing they simply are not there. This is a technological revolution of great significance,” Bachiller emphasized.
The antenna designs are implemented using precision additive manufacturing techniques with high-performance polymer resins that are subsequently metallized with conductive materials.
Next, the operation of the resulting devices is checked in the laboratory, specifically their dispersion parameters are measured – that is, at what frequencies the antenna behaves as an emitter and what percentage of the power that powers the antenna is emitted. – and its radiation pattern – what is the spatial distribution of the antenna’s emission -. These measurements are used to subsequently carry out field tests in real conditions.
The use of additive manufacturing technologies for these applications offers “great versatility” in terms of shape, size and optimization of the use of materials in the manufacture of these devices.
Likewise, the wide range of existing additive manufacturing technology materials and the possibilities of validating their functionality of the developed radio frequency devices “make it easy to optimize the performance of each of them according to the type of antenna to be developed.”
In addition, the various types of existing metallization and the performance of each of the treatments in validating the antenna parameters are investigated.
The person responsible for the project at AIJU, Asunción Martínez, has stressed that research in the stage of selective finishing of the parts obtained with additive manufacturing is giving “very promising results to be able to shorten the manufacturing cycles of the final metallized parts.”
