Miniaturized flexible UWB Antenna Design using Double-Negative Metamaterial structure with enhanced Radiation Gain

This article proposes a miniaturized flexible Ultra Wide Band (UWB) antenna integrated with double negative (DNG) metamaterial structure leading to enhanced gain characteristics. The designed metamaterial integrated UWB antenna is suitable for biomedical application. Here, the UWB antenna having a compact size is designed first, followed by its integration with metasurface structure as its ground plane. The metasurface exhibits a large double negative region from 2 to 11 GHz. Additionally, the metasurface exhibits a large ENG region from 2 to 12 GHz and a large MNG region lying in 2 to 10.8 GHz band. The proposed metasurface ground plane is built using a (4× 4) array of structure’s unit cells employed underneath the initially proposed UWB antenna design. This results in improved impedance bandwidth with better radiation characteristics (gain and 3D radiation pattern). Finally, the integrated, conformal, and flexible metasurface-equipped UWB antenna’s performance is analyzed, and the air gap distance is optimized further. The designed integrated antenna structure is observed to exhibit 10 dB impedance bandwidth from 2-16 GHz and covers the entire standard UWB band with a better radiation gain (18 dB), justifying its use in biomedical, wearable, and healthcare monitoring applications.