Simple, Low-Cost, and Reconfigurable Metamaterials and Metasurfaces Based on Reusable Building Blocks: A proposed approach

A new approach for engineering and fabricating metamaterials and metasurfaces is presented. The design approach is based on reusable building blocks (RBBs) in the form of a stud baseplate and separable RBBs mounted on it. The novelty of the proposed design lies in the reconfigurability of the simple and low-cost structure, which can be easily transformed or modified without a dedicated manufacturing stage. The proposed design approach can be a powerful tool to test experimentally a large number of possible design configurations. A couple of representative examples of the structures comprising nonresonant square and resonant cross elements are presented as a proof of concept based on RBBs. A detailed miniaturization procedure of the cross-plate RBB is then provided to illustrate the versatility of the design approach. To gain a deeper insight into the working mechanism, distributions of the surface current and electric field have also been analyzed. Finally, several types of RBB prototypes have been fabricated and measured to validate the correctness of the reusable scheme based on RBBs.