Performance Improvement of a Dual-Band Textile Antenna for On-Body Through Artificial Magnetic Conductor
Usman Ali, Abdul Basir, Muhammad Zada, Sadiq Ullah, Babar Kamal, Hyoungsuk Yoo
Abstract
The increasing demand for wireless communication in wearable devices has led to the need for wearable antennas with a low profile, flexibility, robustness, low SAR, and acceptable on-body performance for WBAN applications. This study presents a low-profile dual-band wearable antenna for WBAN applications operating at 2.45 and 5.8 GHz. The antenna is integrated with a 3 × 3 artificial magnetic conductor array to reduce backward radiation and improve performance when worn on the human body. It is designed and fabricated on a 2 mm-thick flexible felt substrate with a relative permittivity of 1.3 and loss tangent of 0.044. A 0.17 mm-thick superconductive shielded material is used as conductive material for the antenna and AMC array. The proposed antenna and AMC array have overall volumes of 0.41λ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> × 0.45λ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> × 0.016λ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> and 0.83λ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> × 0.83λ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> × 0.016λ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> , respectively. Results indicate that the AMC structure enhances the antenna’s gain, radiation efficiency, and bandwidth. The use of AMC reduced the SAR by greater than 98% for 1 and 10 g of human tissue at 2.45 and 5.8 GHz. The proposed design is suitable for WBAN applications due to its low profile, flexibility, robustness, low SAR, and acceptable on-body antenna gain and bandwidth.