Simulation Platform for Flexible Electronics

Assessment of the Robustness of Flexible Antennas to Complex Deformations

“…The GC technique belongs to a type of cage-based methods that enclose the object of interest by a so-called bounding cage that has a similar, but less complicated shape than the object of interest, and, as shown in Fig. 2a), for the case of patch antenna the bounding cage is a simple polygonal tube [28][29][30]. All spatial points within the interior of the cage can be expressed in terms of the cage's geometry e.g.…”

“…All spatial points within the interior of the cage can be expressed in terms of the cage's geometry e.g. vertices and face normals of the cage's surface triangulations [28][29][30]. The vertices of the simple cage are then manipulated to generate a wanted deformation as shown in Fig.…”

“…5 shows the relative distortion in the length and width of the radiating patch. The iterative pre-scaling approach described in [28][29][30] is applied to each deformation namely the spherical convex (r = 30 mm), saddle (A=AW=AL=20 mm) and twisting (0.0125 twist/m) deformations. It can be seen that relative distortion is initially high but rapidly reduces after only a few iterations.…”

“…It is commented here that the subsequent choice of modelling method, Finite Elements, Finite Integration Technique, Method of Moments, or their implementation within particular software packages is not the issue, rather it is the geometrical data upon which they operate that has the failing. The main difficulty when generating arbitrary deformations is in obtaining well behaved interfaces between the constitutive parts of the antenna, free of misalignments and microscopic gaps, as discussed in [28][29][30], which can undermine subsequent EM numerical simulations. Our recent work [28] proposed the use of a computer graphics spatial manipulation technique based on Green Coordinates (GC) for generating arbitrary deformations of antennas [31,32].…”

“…The systematic distortions that are introduced by the GC method can be effectively compensated for by using an iterative pre-scaling approach, as shown in [28][29][30], that guarantees physical reality of the final geometries. This approach was calibrated against the simple case of cylindrical bending for which no distortion is expected to occur and proved that the performance of the GC generated cylindrically bent antenna agrees well with the CSG generated antennas opening the way for robust generation of more general antenna deformations [28].…”