Heat-Dissipating Mobile Antenna: A Novel Mobile Antenna Concept with Extremely Small Clearance and Integrated Heat-Dissipating Function

Both electromagnetic radiation and heat dissipation are important for mobile terminals. For material selection, radiation seeks high electrical conductivity and is indifferent to thermal conductivity, whereas dissipation is the opposite. Thus, antenna and thermal engineers must compete for territory to achieve good performance in their respective fields. This article firstly proposes the concept of heat-dissipating mobile antenna, highlighting the advantages of achieving extremely small antenna clearances and integrated heat-dissipating function. Different from conventional mobile antennas made up of metal/dielectrics, novel graphene with high electrical conductivity (<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.1\times 10^{6}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> S/m) is adopted for antenna design, while its high thermal conductivity also indicates good dissipation capability. Thus, antennas and heat dissipation achieve material/space sharing, significantly expanding the spaces for both. By resorting to the radiative metasurface made of this novel graphene, experimental results show that the frame monopoles at 2.5/3.5 GHz with clearances of 0.2 mm achieve the impedance bandwidths and average efficiencies of 280/540 MHz and −3.6/−2.6 dB, respectively, while the maximum temperatures are reduced by 3.5/2.5° C and 3.1/5.0° C for the heat sources of system-on-chip and camera, respectively, compared to the conventional heat-dissipating design. The proposed concept can simultaneously reduce the demand for antenna clearance and cool down terminals without any compromise.