Performance Analysis of Wearable
Antenna Using Different Substrate Fabrics
Ramesh Manikonda
Assistant professor, ECE, GITAM University, Visakhapatnam, India
rmanikon@gitam.edu
Abstract: The performance and analysis of three different substrate fabrics such
as cotton, felt, and jeans for the wearable textile antenna are presented in this
paper. The dielectric constants of three fabrics are between 1 and 2 only. The two
arcs and one circle slot are created on a hexagonal patch. The Wi-Fi shape
wearable textile antenna is designed for WBAN (Wireless Body Area Network)
applications. The simulated results of the radiation pattern return loss and VSWR
of the aforementioned wearable textile antennas with three different substrates are
evaluated, and the same is presented at the end. The Wearable antenna has been
designed using HFSS software.
Keywords: Wearable textile Antenna, Fabric, WBAN
1. Introduction
In the recent generation, the demands for seamless integration of wearable devices
in textile structures are increased, and also miniaturizations of the devices are required.
The wearable devices can communicate with each other through a wearable antenna.
This is called WBAN. It is used for telemedicine, battlefield, and GPS [1]. For WBAN,
a wearable textile antenna is very popular because wearable textile antennas are very
comfortable, flexible, and low cost. The non-conductive and conductive cloths are used
for different textile antennas. Some authors implemented the wearable antenna partially
or fully using fabrics for other parts of the wearable antenna like patch substrate feed
line and ground [2].
The characteristics of the wearable textile antenna are changed depending on the
properties of substrate fabric for the exact dimensions of the antenna. The integration of
flexible textile substrates is suitable for sensor networks and also to wearable
applications [3]. The microstrip antenna was implemented with a flexible Teflon cloth
as substrate, and its relative permittivity εr
=2.1 were reported in [4]. The Teflon
material has better characteristics like low thermal conductivity. The substrate
thickness and multilayer of substrate affect the radiation characteristics like gain,
angular width, and directivity of the antenna. In [5], two techniques are proposed to
investigate the relative permittivity and dielectric loss of three types of fabric: goch,
leather, and jeans fabrics. The two methods gave the same values for leather. In [6], a
miniaturized antenna was proposed by authors using a meta material concept and also
used substrate as a magneto-dielectric material. It is embedded with a conventional
antenna. The antenna area is reduced up to 65% at 2.4 GHz. It is collated with a
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© 2023 The authors and IOS Press.
This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms
of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0).
doi:10.3233/ATDE221314
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