A rigidly foldable and reconfigurable thick origami antenna

A rigidly foldable and reconfigurable origami antenna is developed here. This antenna uses thick folding panels thereby providing robust operation and folding/unfolding actuation, which are very important for many applications in extreme environments, such as space. Also, this antenna can be constructed using standard printed circuit boards, which simplifies its manufacturing. For the reconfigurable antenna developed here, the origami flasher pattern is chosen to achieve a spatial transformation of a dipole operating at 0.48 GHz to a conical spiral antenna (CSA) operating from 2.1 to 3.7 GHz. The design equations for the origami CSA are derived. A prototype is built using a 0.81-mm-thick FR4 substrate to validate the proposed methodology. The antenna parameters are investigated in a wide frequency range. Our simulated results agree very well with the measurements. The rigid structure of the proposed design and its reconfigurable nature make it a good candidate for satellite communications. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Origami/Kirigami-inspired structures: from fundamentals to applications’.