Woven Antennas Fabrication: Conductive Linen and Conductive Cloth Technologies Comparisons

The development of woven antennas will enable novel applications in communications, sensing and safety, due to its inherent features such flexibility and textile-integration. For these reasons, this technology has attracted the attention of academic and industrial communities. However, there are still some factors hindering its extensive use. The aim of this paper is to compare woven antennas using two different technologies exploring the reasons that hinder its application. The technologies tested are: conductive linen and conductive cloth. The woven antennas are designed using a microstrip-design approach and simulations as starting base-line. In both linen and cloth technologies, the manufactured antennas observe variability in its return loss caused by bending (flexiblility) of the antenna body that also contributes to an imperfect connection with feeding cables. The manufactured conductive cloth antennas observe similar results as its corresponding microstrip pairs. On the other hand, conductive linen antennas yield larger bandwidth than expected and more resonances of |S11|. Thus, they can be potential candidates for applications with multi-band specifications.