Design of a Broadband All-Textile Slotted PIFA

Abstract

A new broadband textile based PIFA antenna structure designed for wireless body area network (WBAN) applications is presented. The new topology can be directly integrated into clothing. The study starts by considering three different materials: flexible copper foil, and ShieldIt Super and pure copper polyester taffeta conductive textiles. Bandwidth broadening is successfully achieved by implementing a novel and simple slot in the radiating patch. The measured reflection coefficient and radiation characteristics agree well with simulations. Moreover, radiation characteristics and bandwidth show satisfactory immunity against detuning when operating on-body, especially when placed on the back. To our knowledge, the proposed structure is the first fully fabric based slotted PIFA to be reported in open literature with high bandwidth (more than 46%) and reasonable gain (ca. 1.5 dB), to be used for multiple applications in the frequency band of 1.8 to 3.0 GHz. Index Terms-Broadband antennas, conformal antennas, planar inverted-f antennas (PIFA), textile antennas.

Higher‐mode textile patch antenna with embroidered vias for on‐body communication

“…It can be comfortably worn and embedded in clothing due to its unobtrusive low-profile design. Other textile antenna types, such as PIFA or planar monopole antennas that achieve an omnidirectional radiation pattern are found in the literature [2,23]. The textile PIFA, exhibits a comparable on-body efficiency with the HMMPA up to 40%, although it fails to generate a strong surface wave propagation.…”

“…Some remarkable low-profile, flexible and conformal to the body textile antenna designs have been proposed in the literature [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. According to Hall [10], it has been proven that antennas with normal to human body polarisation generate a strong surface wave propagation mode that is practical for on-body communication.…”

A Dual-Band Low-Profile Metasurface-Enabled Wearable Antenna for Wlan Devices

“…Simultaneously, the impact of a wearable antenna on human tissue, characterized by the specific absorption rate (SAR), also needs to be minimized. The Planar Inverted-F Antenna (PIFA) was used to be an ideal scheme for the wearable antenna design since it has the promising characteristics such as compactness, flexibility and multi-frequency [7,8]; however, the performance of SAR was substandard, and the impendence was easily be changed when loading by the human tissue. Alternatively, the Electromagnetic BandGap (EBG) and Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AMC) ground plane were introduced in the wearable antenna design [9,10]; such substrates can isolate the radiation field and body tissue, decreased the SAR dramatically, while these solutions still suffer from relatively large footprints, over-thick or low front to back (FB) ratios.…”

Meta-Loaded Circular Sector Patch Antenna

“…The size of the antenna needs to be miniaturized while keeping the shape of the antenna flexible in order to suit different needs of the system. A lot of work has been done to realize Electrically Small Antennas (ESA), like the planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA), the meander transmission line antenna, and the loaded microstrip antenna [1][2][3][4][5].…”