Design and Development of Conformal and Reconfigurable UWB Antennas for Wearable Applications

Abstract

This thesis deals with design and development of Ultra Wideband (UWB) Antennas for newlinewearable applications. Literature is available in the area of UWB applications. But, some newlinepeople have reported research work for wearable applications in UWB range. So, there is a newlinescope of research in off-body, on-body, and in-body communication over the complete UWB newlinerange. Therefore, in this thesis, UWB antennas have been designed to achieve the desired newlinecharacteristics required for off-body communication. The antennas have been designed on newlinethree different dielectric substrates like; FR4, RT Duroid, and foam based material. In the first newlinepart, transmission line-fed and Coplanar Waveguide (CPW) fed stepped match UWB newlineantennas on a planar dielectric substrate have been developed. Proposed stepped match UWB newlineantennas for off-body communication have been designed on a planar FR4 substrate with newlinerelative permittivity (and#949;r) 4.4 and dimensions of 32 x 26 mm2. The thickness of the substrate is newline0.8 mm. Parametric studies have been carried out for the proposed stepped match UWB newlineantennas and parameters have been optimized using Computer Simulation Technology (CST) newlineElectromagnetic (EM) simulator v.12. The return loss characteristic is obtained in UWB range newlinefrom 3.1 to 10.6 GHz for both stepped match antennas as prescribed by Federal newlineCommunication Commission (FCC), USA. The gain of the proposed transmission line fed newlinestepped match UWB antenna has been found to vary between 2.2 to 5.01 dB in the UWB newlinefrequency range. The total antenna efficiency of the transmission line fed stepped match newlineUWB antenna is varying between 88.4-98%. The gain of the proposed CPW fed stepped newlinematch UWB antenna has been found to vary between 1.4 to 6.2 dB in the UWB frequency newlinerange. The total antenna efficiency of the CPW fed stepped match UWB antenna is varying newlinebetween 86-97.4%. The optimized antennas are fabricated using standard Microwave newlineIntegrated Circuit (MIC) technique and measurements are performed on Agilent E5071C 20 newlineGHz Vector Network Analyzer (VNA). newline