Design and development of a flexible and elastic UWB wearable antenna on PDMS substrate

This paper proposed design and development of a flexible UWB wearable antenna using flexible and elastic polymer substrate. Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) was chosen to be used as flexible substrate for the proposed antenna which is a kind of silicone elastic, it has attractive mechanical and electrical properties such as flexibility, softness, water resistance low permittivity and transparency. The proposed antenna consists of a rectangular patch with two steps notches in the upper side of the patch, resulting in a more compact and increase in the bandwidth. In addition, the proposed antenna has an elliptical slot for an enhancement of the bandwidth and gain. The bottom side edges of the patch have been truncated to provide an additional surface current path. The proposed UWB wearable antenna functions from 2.5 GHz to 12.4 GHz frequency range and it was successfully designed and the simulated result showed that the return loss was maintained less than -10 dB and VSWR kept less than 2 over the entire desired frequency range (2.5 GHz - 12.4 GHz). The gain of the proposed antenna varies with frequency and the maximum gain recorded is 4.56 dB at 6.5 GHz. Simultaneously, The radiation patterns of the proposed antenna are also presented. The performance of the antenna under bending condition is comparable with the normal condition´s performance.