Bending Investigation of Broadband Wearable All-Textile Antennas

This investigation proposes a method of consistently evaluating wearable textile antennas when operating in bent conditions. This is to emulate the usage of these antennas in practice, when operating on a real human arm in bent conditions. Two similarly-shaped Planar Inverted-F Antenna (PIFA) made from a common substrate and different flexible metallic conductors and are studied. Both antennas are bent in two different orthogonal axes on three different cylindrical sizes, 20, 40 and 60 mm in radius. These cylinders are defined using electrical properties similar to the human arm at 2.5 GHz. Bending in the axis along the antenna's radiating edge, i.e. at the x-direction using the smallest sized cylinder was found to be the worst performing configuration in terms of reflection coefficient, bandwidth, and gain.status: accepte