Preliminary studies on the use of natural rubber in the design of flexible microstrip antennas

In this paper, we report the first attempt to use natural rubber as a substrate in the design of flexible microstrip patch antennas. The effects of dielectric properties of rubber on the performance of microstrip patch antennas are presented. The patch geometry has been designed and optimized at a frequency of 10 GHz. It has been found that for a fixed substrate thickness, the antenna directivity and return loss decrease with increasing relative permittivity. However for a given permittivity, increasing the substrate thickness will result in lower return loss but higher directivity. Hence, some trade-off must be made between these parameters in order to obtain an optimum design.