New generations of printed flexible antennas are playing an important role in wireless communication systems. The ultra wide band and wearable possibilities are critical aspects of these kinds of antennas. In this study, the proposed antenna is an elliptical monopole fed by a coplanar waveguide; it uses a kapton substrate and it is optimised to work from 1 to 8 GHz. In the case of copper, a conductive nanocomposite material based on a polymer (polyaniline: PANI) and charged by multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) is exploited. The flexibility of both the kapton substrate and the nanocomposite (PANI/MWCNTs) provides the ability to crumple the antenna paving the way to potential applications for body‐worn wireless communications systems. In this study, the performance of the antenna is investigated in terms of return loss, radiation patterns and gain for both crumpled and uncrumpled antennas. The results confirm that performance remains at a good level when the antenna is crumpled.
This study presents the conception, simulation, realisation and characterisation of a patch antenna made of a composite based on polyaniline (PANI) and multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs). The antenna is designed to operate at the frequency of 4.5 GHz; the dielectric substrate used is Rogers RT/Duroid® 5870 which has a dielectric permittivity of 2.33 and a loss tangent of 0.0012. The conductive polymer (PANI/MWCNTs) fabricated has a conductivity of 4500 S/m. The performance of the proposed antenna is investigated as a function of the thickness of the conductive polymer. The experimental results show an antenna gain of 5.18 dB for a PANI/MWCNTs thickness of 110 μm. The results obtained suggest that this kind of conductive polymers are good candidates for future applications based on organic electronics.
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