Transformation of Artistic Drawings Into WLAN-Band Wearable Antennas

Abstract

A novel concept of transforming complex and artistic geometries into antennas in the wireless local area network (WLAN) band is presented. Four artistic antennas are designed in the Wi-Fi band and measured. All antennas are based on the microstrip antenna concept. To be flexible for wearable applications, the antennas are embroidered on the textile material using conductive thread. Based on the composition of the textile material and its properties, some of the textile samples are finalized from several samples under test (SUTs), which are further used in the antenna design. The dielectric constant of the SUT is extracted using the resonance technique. The solid copper ground (GND) plane is made of shielded fabric, which provides the required flexibility. A low-power short-range Wi-Fi band communication system is designed for testing the transmission and reception authentication from the antennas embedded on several dresses. The simulated and measured performance of the antennas in terms of matching bandwidth, realized gain, radiation efficiency, and radiation patterns is presented, which shows good agreement (evaluated at 2.45 GHz).