Robust planar textile antenna for wireless The textile antenna is excited by means of a 50 O coaxial SMA feed.
body LANs operating in 2.45 GHz ISM band To obtain a 10 dB return loss in the ISM band and to avoid linear
polarisation, the geometry of the antenna patch and the location of the
A. Tronquo, H. Rogier, C. Hertleer and L. Van Langenhove feed point were optimised using the 2.5-D field simulator ADS-
Momentum1 from Agilent Technologies. Material losses are not
A single-feed rectangular-ring textile antenna is proposed for wireless included in the simulations. Linear polarisation is avoided by placing
body area networks operating in the 2.45 GHz ISM band. The the feed point on a diagonal of the patch, thereby exciting the two
conductive parts of the planar antenna consist of FlecTron1, whereas orthogonally polarised TM01 and TM10 modes. The necessary band-
fleece fabric is used as non-conductive antenna substrate. This results width is obtained by choosing slightly different values for the patch
in a highly efficient, flexible and wearable antenna to be integrated in length L and width W. More details about the radiation mechanism of
garments. The robustness of the antenna characteristics with respect to the planar rectangular-ring antenna can be found in [6]. After the
bending is proven. simulations resulted in a suitable design, several textile prototypes were
built and measured.
Antenna construction and design: The availability of novel electro-
textiles opens new possibilities for wireless communication. Further-
more, the introduction of new wireless protocols for body area 0
networks and personal area networks (BANs and PANs) operating -5
in the 2.45 GHz band, based on the Zigbee (IEEE 802.15.4), Blue-
tooth [1] (IEEE 802.15), WiFi (IEEE 802.11b=g), Wireless USB, and -10
WiMAX (IEEE 802.16a) protocols, poses some real challenges to -15 D
antenna design based on textile materials. The emergence of intelli-
S11, dB
-20
gent textile systems requires the development of low-cost, flexible and
lightweight antennas that are easily integrated into clothing. Quite -25
recently, the application of new conductive textile materials has led to -30
the development of the first wearable antenna prototypes [2–5]. In this
Letter, we present a single-feed planar rectangular-ring textile antenna -35 simulated
planar antenna
for wireless body LANs operating in the 2.4–2.483 GHz band, as -40 bent antenna D = 12 cm
shown in Fig. 1. With the exception of the connector, the antenna is bent antenna D = 7.5 cm
-45
manufactured entirely from textile materials. As antenna substrate, 2.0 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8 3.0
fleece fabric is used; a material that has excellent characteristics for frequency, GHz
optimal antenna efficiency. The piled fabric structure yields a permit-
tivity close to 1 and provides sufficient thickness for an adequate Fig. 2 Measured and simulated return loss (S11)
bandwidth. The conducting ground plane and the antenna consist of a
FlecTron1 fabric, which is a thin (thickness of 0.006 inch), flexible
and lightweight copper plated nylon woven fabric. This fabric was
chosen because of its high conductivity (surface resistivity < 0.1 O=sq.)
and easy handling like cutting and sewing. The different layers
were stitched together in order to ensure a well-defined substrate
thickness and to keep the antenna conformal when it is bent. The
dimensions of the antenna are specified in Table 1.
Fig. 3 Simulated antenna gain at 2.45 GHz
a xz-plane
b yz-plane
W W Simulation and measurement results: In Fig. 2 the simulated return
loss is compared to measurements. A robust design is obtained by
extending the bandwidth to 2.34–2.51 GHz, to accommodate a
potential shift in frequency in a real-life application, and by decreas-
ing the in-band return loss to less than 11.5 dB. Excellent agreement
is found between data obtained with the 2.5-D field simulator and
measurement data. The measured bandwidth of the planar textile
antenna is found to be 230 MHz. To investigate the effect of bending
FlecTron® air on the antenna characteristics, the antenna was attached to plastic
cylinders with diameters D ¼ 12 cm and D ¼ 7.5 cm. Although the
fleece h measured bandwidth decreases owing to bending, the 2.45 GHz band
is still completely covered. In Fig. 3, we compare the gain of the
planar 2.5-D antenna (infinite substrate þ ground plane, resulting
Fig. 1 Geometry of rectangular-ring microstrip textile antenna from the ADS-Momentum1 simulation) to the gain of the antenna
on a finite ground plane (þ substrate) of dimensions 78 73.5 mm.
The latter 3-D configuration was modelled based on the CST
Microwave Studio1 field simulator. We also studied the effect of
Table 1: Dimensions of rectangular-ring textile antenna
the human body, represented by a lossy substrate with er ¼ 42 and
Patch (FlecTron1) Substrate (fleece) s ¼ 0.99 S=m (proposed by CENELEC), located at 8 mm below the
L (mm) 49 h (mm) 2.56 antenna ground plane. One observes that both the finite ground plane
W (mm) 52 er 1.25 and the presence of the human body only produce some minor
Feed point (mm) (7;9) tan d 0 differences in radiation characteristics compared to the planar 2.5-D
Slot
antenna simulated by ADS-Momentum1. Fig. 4 shows the simulated
and measured antenna gain along broadside (z-direction, orthogonal
l (mm) 8
to the antenna xy-plane). The antenna gain was measured in an
w (mm) 7
anechoic chamber, but, as in a realistic application, no special
ELECTRONICS LETTERS 2nd February 2006 Vol. 42 No. 3
measures were taken to make the two textile antennas fully planar, nor between two antennas remains excellent when the receiver antenna is
did we use an extensive procedure for accurate alignment between the rotated with respect to the transmitter, given the nearly circular
two antennas. The measured in-band gain is not more than polarisation of the antenna.
about 1.5 dB lower than the simulated gain. Consequently, the
measured antenna efficiency is at least 70% (compared to the 100%
antenna efficiency of the lossless simulated antenna). Fig. 4 also Acknowledgments: H. Rogier is a Postdoctoral Researcher of the
indicates the combined gain and polarisation mismatch for two FWO-V. His research was supported by a grant of the DWTC=SSTC,
aligned textile antennas for which the main axes of their polarisation MOTION project.
ellipses are rotated by 90 . Only a very small reduction in gain owing
to polarisation mismatch is observed, proving that the polarisation of
the textile antenna is nearly circular. # IEE 2006 1 December 2005
Electronics Letters online no: 20064200
doi: 10.1049/el:20064200
A. Tronquo and H. Rogier (Department of Information Technology,
Ghent University, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, 9000 Gent, Belgium)
E-mail: hendrikr@[Link]
C. Hertleer and L. Van Langenhove (Department of Textiles, Ghent
University, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, 9000 Gent, Belgium)
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ELECTRONICS LETTERS 2nd February 2006 Vol. 42 No. 3
