A Deployable Quasi-Yagi Monopole Antenna using Three Origami Magic Spiral Cubes

Abstract

We propose a deployable quasi-Yagi monopole antenna using origami magic spiral cubes, constructed from low cost paper substrate. The proposed quasi-Yagi antenna consists of an L-shaped driven monopole, an L-shaped reflector, and two L-shaped directors. These driven monopole, reflector and directors are designed in L-shaped geometries to achieve maximum gain in a limited cube size. The driven element and reflector are realized on the origami magic cube #1, while the two directors are designed on the magic cubes #2 and #3, respectively. The cubes are stacked together using a thin adhesive film. The presented geometry of the origami magic spiral cube antenna can be easily folded and unfolded. The dimensions in the unfolded state are 44 mm × 44 mm × 132 mm while the dimensions in the folded state are 44 mm × 44 mm × 8 mm. Therefore, in the folded state, the antenna occupies only 6% of the unfolded volume. We have numerically analyzed the antenna performance and verified the outcomes experimentally. The L-shaped reflector has increased the monopole antenna gain from 1.9 to 5.7 dBi. With the addition of two directors, the gain is further increased to 7.3 dBi at 1.9 GHz. IEEE