Continuous-range tunable multilayer frequency-selective surfaces using origami and inkjet printing.

The tremendous increase in the number of components in typical electrical and communication modules requires low-cost, flexible and multifunctional sensing, energy harvesting, and communication modules that can readily reconfigure, depending on changes in their environment. Current subtractive manufacturing-based reconfigurable systems offer limited flexibility (limited finite number of discrete reconfiguration states) and have high fabrication cost and time requirements. Thus, this paper introduces an approach to solve the problem by combining additive manufacturing and origami principles to realize tunable electrical components that can be reconfigured over continuous-state ranges from folded (compact) to unfolded (large surface) configurations.