Low-Cost Ball-Pen Gap Waveguide With Nearly Zero Friction for Sliding Movements
Journal article, 2023

This letter presents a novel easy-to-manufacture ball-pen gap waveguide (GW) by utilizing commercial low-cost ball pens to have mechanical reconfigurability. The proposed ball-pen GW consists of a perforated bottom metal plate with ball pens' tips inserted and a flat top plate. Compared with the other noncontact GWs with bed-of-pins structures obtained by milling, the realization of the new ball-pen GW requires only drilling holes on the bottom plate for inserting ball-pen tips to obtain the electromagnetic bandgap property, making it low cost. The more important advantage of the ball-pen GW is to make use of the balls of the ball-pen tips to realize smooth low-friction sliding movements for the mechanical reconfiguration. For the sake of verification, a double 90 degrees bend of the ball-pen GW has been designed, manufactured, and measured. Both simulated and measured results demonstrate its excellent transmission performance and the movable property.

mechanical movement

Ball-pen gap waveguide (GW)

mechanical reconfiguration

low-cost manufacture

Author

Enlin Wang

Xidian University

Ashraf Uz Zaman

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Zehong Yan

Xidian University

Jian Yang

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS

2771-957X (ISSN) 2771-9588 (eISSN)

Vol. 33 11 1580-1583

Subject Categories

Applied Mechanics

DOI

10.1109/LMWT.2023.3312522

More information

Latest update

11/10/2023