Abstract
The simultaneous influences of the substrate anisotropy and substrate bending are numerically and experimentally investigated in this paper for planar resonators on flexible textile and polymer substrates. The pure bending effect has been examined by the help of well-selected flexible isotropic substrates. The origin of the anisotropy (direction-depended dielectric constant) of the woven textile fabrics has been numerically and then experimentally verified by two authorship methods described in the paper. The effect of the anisotropy has been numerically divided from the effect of bending and for the first time it was shown that both effects have almost comparable but opposite influences on the resonance characteristics of planar resonators. After the selection of several anisotropic textile fabrics, polymers, and flexible reinforced substrates with measured anisotropy, the opposite influence of both effects, anisotropy and bending, has been experimentally demonstrated for rectangular resonators. The separated impacts of the considered effects are numerically investigated for more sophisticated resonance structures—with different types of slots, with defected grounds and in fractal resonators for the first three fractal iterations. The bending effect is stronger for the slotted structures, while the effect of anisotropy predominates in the fractal structures. Finally, useful conclusions are formulated and the needs for future research are discussed considering effects in metamaterial wearable patches and antennas.
Highlights
Many artificial materials known with their traditional applications in the human life can be considered as electrodynamic media due to the propagation of waves through them
Our observations show that a lot of research papers appeared in the last several years concerning the characterization of the dielectric parameters of the most popular textile fabrics [7,8,9,10,11,12]
The step is to verify with results the assumption that the bending effect and substrate anisotropy have opposite impacts on the wearable radiators and sensors (Section 3.2)
Summary
Many artificial materials known with their traditional applications in the human life can be considered as electrodynamic media due to the propagation of waves through them. Most of these materials and some of their flexible polymer substitutes have been transformed into a new type of electronic components—antenna/sensor substrates due to their new applications in the wearable communication systems (antennas, sensors, radio-frequency identification or RFID, millimetrewave identification or mmID, etc.) [1,2,3,4,5]. In this role, they look like the commercial reinforced substrates with PCB (printed circuit board) applications (a comparison has been given in [6], chapter IV). The textile substrates differ from the reinforced substrates consist of natural and/or synthetic fibres (threads, yarns, filaments, etc.) in air and form fibrous structures with a considerably bigger variety of different cross-section views [13,14] in comparison with the simple woven or non-woven reinforced substrates
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