Performance Analysis of a Screen-Printing Process for Cost-Effective Flexible Bow-Tie Antennas

This paper presents a comparative analysis of performance for several antenna prototypes using a screen-printing process. This analysis was performed using various bow-tie antenna configurations, including single-band and multi-band antennas with linear or circular polarization over multiple operating frequency ranges. For antenna implementations, three different conductive inks and two resolutions of screen masks were tested. The performance of the fabricated prototypes has then been compared to the copper laser-etched antennas. This study revealed that with the proper selection of ink thinness, screen-printed bow-tie antennas achieve similar performances to copper laser-etched bow-tie antennas up to 6 GHz, even for linearly polarized and circularly polarized antennas. However, the printing resolution should be improved by reducing the ink thickness for bow-tie antennas at higher operating frequencies. The measurement results show a successful agreement after improving the printing resolution of the fabricated 5.8 GHz and 15 GHz bi-band bow-tie antennas.