Polypropylene-Based Dual-Band CPW-Fed Monopole Antenna [Antenna Applications Corner]

A flexible, wearable CPW-fed monopole antenna, based on aluminum-metallized polypropylene (PP), is presented. Its low cost, light weight, and moisture robustness make it proper for 2.45 GHz and 5.8 GHz dual-band RFID applications. A polypropylene sample was electromagnetically characterized in terms of relative dielectric permittivity and loss tangent in order to design the antenna. The performance of the polypropylene-based antenna in both simulation and measurement was compared to the performance of a commercial rigid-dielectric substrate-based antenna with the same geometry. The robustness to moisture of the manufactured polypropylene-based antenna was also tested.