Liverpool team tune into reconfigurable liquid antennas

Antennas, which are used in everything from mobile phones to radar, convert radio waves into electrical signals. The devices are typically built from metals such as copper, which have good conductivity.

However, metal antennas tend to be large, heavy and expensive, and cannot be reconfigured to operate across different frequencies. This is likely to become an increasing limitation as we move towards greater wireless communication between even tiny everyday devices in the “Internet of Things”.

Now, in an EPSRC-funded project, researchers at Liverpool University are hoping to develop small, transparent antennas that could be used in future 5G wireless networks, and in machine-to-machine communication.

Liquids, including water, are known to be capable of acting as an antenna, according to Professor Yi Huang, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, who is leading the project.

“Liquids like water are transparent, which makes them attractive from an appearance perspective,” said Huang.

“The wavelength [of an electromagnetic signal] is also much shorter in liquid than in free space or metal,” he said.