Flexible wearable composite antennas for global wireless communication systems

Abstract

Although wearable antennas have made great progress in recent years, how to design high-performance antennas suitable for most wireless communication systems has always been the direction of RF workers. In this paper, a new approach for the design and manufacture of a compact, low-profile, broadband, omni-directional and conformal antenna is presented, including the use of a customized flexible dielectric substrate with high permittivity and low loss tangent to realize the compact sensing antenna. Poly-di-methyl-siloxane (PDMS) is doped a certain proportion of aluminum trioxide (Al2O3) and Poly-tetra-fluoro-ethylene (PTFE) to investigate the effect of dielectric constant and loss tan-gent. Through a large number of comparative experiments, data on different doping ratios show that the new doped materials are flexible enough to increase dielectric constant, re-duce loss tangent and significantly improve the load resistance capacity. The antenna is configured with a multisection microstrip stepped impedance resonator structure (SIR) to expand the bandwidth. The measured reflection return loss (S11) showed an operating frequency band from 0.99 to 9.41 GHz, with a band ratio of 146%. The antenna covers two important frequency bands, 1.71–2.484 GHz (personal communication system and wireless body area network (WBAN) systems) and 5.15–5.825 GHz (wireless local area net-work-WLAN)]. It also passed the SAR test for human safety. Therefore, the proposed antenna offers a good chance for full coverage of WLAN and large-scale development of wearable products. It also has potential applications in communication systems, wireless energy acquisition systems and other wireless systems.