An inkjet-printed bendable antenna for wearable electronics.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Yu, Hang Zhang, Xingguo Zheng, Hao Li, Dachao Pu, Zhihua
Copyright Year	2023
Abstract	104Flexible antennas, which can conform to the skin and transfer signals to terminals, are particularly useful for wearable electronics. Bending, which frequently occurs to flexible devices, significantly affects the performance of flexible antennas. Inkjet printing has been used as an additive manufacturing technology for fabricating flexible antenna in recent years. However, there is little research on the bending performance of inkjet printing antenna in both simulation and experiment. This paper proposes a bendable coplanar waveguide antenna with a small size of 30 × 30 × 0.05 mm3 by combining the advantages of fractal antenna and serpentine antenna, which realizes the ultra-wideband feature and avoids the problems of large dielectric layer thickness (greater than 1 mm) and large volume of traditional microstrip antenna at the same time. The structure of the antenna was optimized by simulation using the Ansys high-frequency structure simulator, and the antenna was fabricated on a flexible polyimide substrate by inkjet printing. The experimental characterization results show that the central frequency of the antenna is 2.5 GHz, the return loss is −32 dB, and the absolute bandwidth is 850 MHz, which is consistent with the simulation results. The results demonstrate that the antenna has anti-interference capability and can meet the ultra-wideband characteristics. When the traverse and longitudinal bending radius are greater than 30 mm and skin proximity greater than 1 mm, the resonance frequency offsets are mostly within 360 MHz, and return losses of the bendable antenna are within the −14 dB compared with the no bending condition. The results exhibit that the proposed inkjet-printed flexible antenna is bendable and promising for wearable applications.
Related Links	https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC10261132&blobtype=pdf
ISSN	24247723
Journal	International Journal of Bioprinting [Int J Bioprint]
Volume Number	9
DOI	10.18063/ijb.722
PubMed Central reference number	PMC10261132
Issue Number	4
PubMed reference number	37323486
e-ISSN	24248002
Language	English
Publisher	Whioce Publishing Pte. Ltd.
Publisher Date	2023-03-29
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, permitting distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Copyright: © 2023, Yu H, Zhang X, Zheng H, et al.
Subject Keyword	Flexible antenna Bendable antenna Coplanar waveguides Inkjet printing
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Materials Science Biotechnology