Flexible printed monopole antennas for WLAN applications

In this paper, we present two thin/flexible printed monopole antennas for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) applications. The first design is a single band antenna which operates at 2.4 GHz while the second one is a dual band antenna operates at 2.5 GHz and 5.2 GHz. The dimensions of the proposed antennas are: (26.5 mm × 25) and (35 mm × 25) mm for the single band and dual band respectively. Antenna properties, such as gain, far-field radiation patterns, coupling coefficient, expressed in terms of the scattering parameter S11 are provided. Design and simulations are performed using CST Microwave Studio software which is based on the Finite Integration Technique (FIT). Moreover, the effect of folding the antenna was performed experimentally on both designs to study its influence on the antenna performance. The achieved gain for the single band antenna is 1.8 dB with a measured bandwidth of 270 MHz. The dual band antenna achieved a gain of 1.8 dB and 4 dB at 2.5 GHz and 5.2 GHz respectively, and measured bandwidths of 305 MHz and 480 MHz at the first and second band respectively. The proposed thin and flexible designs along with antennas characteristics are suitable for integration into flexible technologies for WLAN applications.