Development of Flexible Textile Patch Antenna Using Coating Technique

This paper explores the development of a flexible textile patch antenna, manufactured using a coating technique with the intended application for IEEE 802.11a wireless communications. The utilization of textile material offers adequate flexibility, enabling its usage as a body-worn antenna. The proposed patch antenna comprises three layers of cotton applied as a dielectric substrate. An inset-fed radiating patch is implemented using a coating technique, by brushing a square patch and feeding line pattern on the top side of upper layer cotton using conductive paint. To evaluate the flexibility of patch antenna, the characterization is performed under flat and bending conditions. The characterization results show that the proposed textile patch antenna works well at the frequency of 5.8 GHz in both conditions, demonstrating its flexibility without compromising its radiation characteristics. The measured bandwidths are 1.2 GHz and 3.8 GHz for flat and bending conditions, respectively, or the fractional bandwidths of 20.68% and 65.5%. In spite of these differences, the proposed textile patch antenna can produce adequate bandwidth response suitable for the desirable application.