Bending Assessment of Dual-band Split Ring-shaped and Bar Slotted All-Textile Antenna for Off-body WBAN/WLAN and 5G Applications

This paper presents a dual-band split ring-shaped and bar slotted textile antenna for potential WBAN/WLAN and 5G applications. The antenna is made using textiles and features a full ground plane to possibly alleviate coupling to the human body. The overall size of the antenna is 70 × 70 mm
²
, with a patch sized at 47.2 × 31 mm
²
0.472λ×0.031λ. The antenna is made using ShieldIt Super as its conductive textile and felt as its substrate. To enable its dual-band resonance at 2.45 and 3.5 GHz a split ring-shaped and bar slots are integrated onto the patch. . The proposed antenna is evaluated when bent under different radii and at different axes to estimate its performance in terms of reflection coefficient, bandwidth, efficiency and gain. A 10-dB impedance bandwidth of 57 % or 135 MHz (from 2.39 to 2.52 GHz) and 70 % or 240 MHz (from 3.45 to 3.56 GHz) are obtained when evaluated in the planar /bent configuration. The maximum realized gain is 6 dBi for at 3.5 GHz. These performances indicate that the antenna proposed in this work can be potentially improved for applications in WBAN/WLAN and 5G bands.