Filter cable design with defected conductor transmission structures.

Electrical cables, as the industry's blood vessels and nervous system, require evolving distributed filtering for complex electromagnetic environment adaptability. This article introduces a filter cable design featuring an insulated cylinder coated with a defected conductor transmission structure (DCTS). The DCTS, with a well-designed etched pattern, functions as a boundary condition for transmitting specific frequency electromagnetic waves, similar to a lumped filter circuit. To validate this method, a low-pass filter cable is proposed with six-slot-ring defected structures, utilizing polytetrafluoroethylene as the inner dielectric, encased within a flexible printed circuit board (FPCB)-manufactured DCTS. The proposed cable, with precise dimensions (2.4 mm diameter, 340 mm length), demonstrates minimal insertion loss ( < 0.38 dB below 6 GHz) in the passband and rejection exceeding 23 dB at 7.7-25 GHz in the stopband. Further enhancements achieve attenuation exceeding 50 dB in the stopband (7.1 GHz to 20 GHz). Compared to traditional cables, this filter cable addresses electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) by cutting off the interference coupling path.

Design of filtering cable with defected conductor layer.

Electrical cables, often referred to as 'blood vessels' and 'nerves' of the industry, play a vital role in the connection of electrical devices. However, traditional cables that lack distributed filtering functions are usually the primary coupling path for electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) problems. An innovative design for a filtering cable, which incorporates insulated electrical wires coated with a specific defected conductor layer (DCL), enables it to achieve distributed filtering advantages along its axis. Microwave network analysis is employed to build the two-port network model of filtering cable, which efficiently analyzes the cascading characteristics of periodic or aperiodic filtering cables. To validate, the flexible printed circuit board (FPCB) with sawtooth dumbbell-shaped DCL and mounted by capacitors is wrapped around the stripped section of the coaxial cable to manufacture a multi-stopband filtering cable. Simulated and measured results demonstrate that the proposed filtering cable can be effectively suppressed in the stopband, which can be adjusted by changing the values of capacitors.