Artistic textile antennas

Abstract

A novel concept of transforming complex artistic geometries into antennas in the WLAN band is presented. These artitic antennas are designed to be part of the artistic geometry without any distortion of the original artistic look. Several antennas are designed in the WiFi band for several applications. Some antennas are embedded on the wearable dresses. To make the antennas flexible for the wearable application, the antennas are embroidered on the textile material using conductive thread. Several textile samples under test (SUT) are analyzed for this purpose, and some of them are selected based on their material composition, and the elasticity. The dielectric constant of the fabric is extracted using resonance technique. All the antennas are based on the microstrip antenna concept. The copper ground (GND) plane is replaced with shielded fabric. Among many of our designed antennas, the performances of four of them are presented. A low power Wi-Fi band communication system is designed where the fourth antennas are embedded in many dresses for testing the transmission and reception authentication. The performance of the antennas is evaluated at 2.45 GHz. These antennas exhibit good performance in terms of directivity, radiation efficiency, radiation pattern, and with adequate matching bandwidth.