UWB antennas on conductive textiles

Abstract

Textile antennas fabricated using conductive E-threads are highly attractive for applications requiring conformality, flexibility, and robustness. However, most E-thread antennas reported to date operate at frequencies <; 3 GHz. This is because of losses at higher frequencies, typically associated with surface roughness and imperfect metallization. In this work, we study the performance of ultra wideband (UWB) textile antennas at much higher frequencies. Specifically, we fabricated and studied the performance of: a) a textile spiral antenna operating at 1-6 GHz, and b) a textile patch antenna operating at 3-11 GHz. As expected, losses increase with frequency. However, results show that the textile antennas can still operate up to 11 GHz. In this case, the achieved realized gain is about 5 dB lower than simulations based on perfect electric conducting (PEC) surfaces.