Recent work on reconfigurable antennas and smart skins based on biologically inspired mechanisms derived from the cuttlefish has led to several novel architectures for system-level integration. One of the concepts arising from work in this area is the capillary-based reconfiguration/adaptation mechanism utilizing the displacement and/or flow of functionalized nanoparticles dispersions within the substrate of a microstrip patch antenna. Through a pressure-driven system, these capillary structures can be used to reconfigure the impedance bandwidth of the antenna. In addition to this operation, the capillary topology has also demonstrated an ability to provide a self-stimulated, or cognitive, mechanism which can compensate for a localized deformation or bending of the antenna on a flexible substrate via the associated forces from mechanical compression. In both of these cases, the use of a single capillary and series/corporate arrays of capillaries has created the opportunity to investigate some of the fundamental operational perspectives and integration techniques in the design space for microstrip antennas utilizing this reconfiguration/compensation technique. In addition to several small antenna arrays and multi-capillary configurations, an in-depth analysis of the single substrate-embedded capillary will be discussed in this paper and presentation. The resulting design equations and other analytical expressions have been derived using perturbation techniques based on the microstrip antenna's design. These demonstrate many of the limitations and possibilities from different nanoparticle geometries and material compositions as well as different capillary topologies associates with fabrication techniques. Measured, analytical, and simulated results for several antennas in this design space will be discussed to highlight the ongoing work in this area.
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