All-Synthetic-Polymer Sustainable Terahertz Technologies

The project proposes a transformative new technology realising the world’s first all-synthetic-polymer THz systems for completely replacing conventional energy and resource-depleting metal-based THz technologies.

Several advantages are associated with this concept such as superior figure of merit, >100x less resource requirement, free-form 3D THz component structurability, biodegradability of all materials used for sustainable radios and completely eliminating the use of metals.

A large antenna array with >100 independent beams using single-mode THz Bragg fibre integrated with frequency selective surfaces and reconfigurable liquid crystal switches will be developed to demonstrate the concept.The first phase of the project comprises basic theoretical modelling and simulations of electromagnetic interactions and radiation mechanism of 500GHz Bragg-fibre leaky-wave antennas and metasurfaces for multi-beam beamformers with 360° coverage.

In phase two, both homogenous and heterogenous integrations of various passive devices, e.g. all-polymer FSSs and liquid crystals, are comprehensively investigated for their effects on, i.e., the THz frequency filtering and reconfigurability of the beamformer developed.

Phase three comprises microfabrication development for implementing the all-polymer beamformer with, i.e., additive manufacturing.

In the final phase, the fully integrated all-polymer multi-beam beamformers are designed, prototyped and demonstrated for their figure of merit.