An approach to design a quad-band NRI metamaterial for multipurpose
sensor applications
Abstract
The governing topic of this article is the design and investigation of a
novel negative refractive index (NRI) metamaterial (MTM) in the
microwave region. This multi-band MTM is realized by employing a square
ring resonator along with two triangular-shaped resonators. Here, the
designed unit cell produces double negative (DNG) regions to the extent
of 3.6–3.9 GHz, 6.8–7.6 GHz, 10.11–10.4 GHz, and 13.4–13.7 GHz and
shows NRI properties in S-, C-, X-, and Ku-bands. Moreover, the design
and performance evaluation of the 2×2 and 4×4 array configurations are
investigated. Both of the structures create NRI band around S-, C-, X-,
and Ku-bands. Also, the proposed MTM has an effective medium ratio of
13.8. The performance of the proposed MTM is validated by the sensor
design study. Hence the proposed MTM is assigned for sensing pressure
variation, for distinguishing used and unused transformer oil, and also
to detect the several chemicals and chemical-water mixtures. The
distinctive observation of the sensor study reveals 80 MHz frequency
difference between dark and clear oil and more than 340 MHz resonance
frequency shifting phenomena in X-bands for chemical sensing
applications. Besides pressure sensor study exposes linear shifting of
the resonances in S-, C-, X-, and Ku-bands.