A Low-cost Textile Antenna using Thermal-transfer Printing

Future generation of mobile technology, IMT-2020 aims to create a viable mobile ecosystem with an affordable prices. Due to these reasons, the need for the communication solution which can be implemented with low cost, low complexity and low delay of signal transmission has risen. In order to satisfy these demands, textile printed antenna technique has been proposed. However, conventional antenna designs are having rigid structure, narrow bandwidth, expensive metallization, high-cost techniques and lack of robustness. In this project, a low cost textile antenna is developed using low-cost conductive carbon with low cost technique of thermal-transfer printing which offers high conformability, robustness, ease of integration and is concurrently comfortable. The textile antenna is designed using different size of stepped impedance with coplanar wave guide (CPW) as the feeding structure. The cotton material has the dielectric constant of 1.4 to 1.7 while the conductive carbon ink is used as the radiating element. The printed antenna shows the return loss of -31.61 dB, gain of 3.11 dB, 81.73 % radiation efficiency and VSWR of 1.95 while the directivity is 3.812 dB. The presented design is able to achieve wider bandwidth of 12% at 5.8 GHz