Design and Modeling of a Flexible Conductive Fabric Antenna Integrated in an OLED Light Source for WIMAX Wireless Communication Systems

Abstract

This work presents a new bendable antenna for worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) wireless communication systems. These antennas, transparent and flexible, will be easily integrated into various mdia and in particular OLED lighting which could be part of the public lighting network of tomorrow as well as on all display media. The integration of these antennas as close as possible to the end-user is a possible solution to reduce the energy consumption which goes hand in hand with the increase in the data rate. This kind of new antenna, designed to be integrated in organic light-emitting diode (OLED), was modeled from a transparent VeilShieldTM conductive fabric and was placed on a 100% polyester substrate with a thickness of 1.5 mm and a loss tangent of 0.02. We have tested and evaluated the characteristic parameters of our antenna, namely the reflection coefficient, the radiation pattern and the gain, to find out the performance of our proposed design. The performance of the transparent conductive fabric integrated in the 100% polyester substrate is tested for the application of flexible antenna operating at 3.5 GHz with a gain value of 5.38 dB. We have integrated this proposed new antenna with the OLED light source containing four layers of different materials and electrical properties: aluminum cathode layer, polymer layer, indium tin oxide (ITO) anode layer and glass substrate layer. After integration, the resonant frequency shifted to 3.52 GHz with a gain value of 4.61 dB. In addition, we also tested the concave bending on the reflection coefficient of the proposed flexible antenna taking into account the different bending angles. This work demonstrates the possibility of integrating these unconventional materials used for the proposed antenna within the OLED despite weak effects on the resonant frequency and the gain of the proposed antenna after integration.