Characterization of Flexible Patch Antennas on Planar and Curved Surfaces

Abstract

This paper analyses patch antennas operating at 16 GHz on flexible Kapton polyimide substrate in various shapes, namely rectangular, circular, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, and octagon. Their applications in medical areas, more particularly in wearable devices for E-health, are targeted. The bending effects of these antennas are studied, more specifically on gain, return loss, radiation characteristics, bandwidth, and beamwidth. A detailed comparison results showed that the rectangular patch had better performance even under the bending when the diameter of the surface is varied from 40mm to 120mm and maintains a gain of 4.8 dB at the given frequency. Under such extreme bending, the antennas operate satisfactorily with an efficiency of 43.424% to 47.41%.