Approach to fabricate rigid substrate for 2.4 GHz inverted-F antenna using a room temperature curable dielectric ink on photo and nanopaper

Abstract The effect of a room temperature curable dielectric ink (ZrSiO₄) printed on commercial photo paper and prepared nanopaper on the dielectric properties at 2.4 GHz are studied. In both cases, the dielectric layer decreased the relative permittivity and dielectric loss and made the flexible substrates rigid. For the nanopaper, the permittivity decreased from 4.7 to 3.57 and the loss value from 0.12 to 0.04. The measured decreases for the photo paper were from 3.12 to 2.61 and from 0.09 to 0.05, respectively. In the performance of the simulated and fabricated inverted-F antennas, the effect of the dielectric layer could be observed in the decrease of its frequency with about 130 MHz mainly due to the thicker substrate. The measured total efficiency and gain were 83% and 3.4 dB. The proposed approach could be in the future used for further development of the antenna by modification of the dielectric ink with different additives