Wideband Transmission Line Characterization of Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as a Wearable Antenna Substrate

In this paper, a wideband transmission-line method has been proposed for the characterization of the dielectric properties of a silicon-based elastomer Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), which can be used as a potential substrate for wearable antenna applications. For the measurements, three types of transmission line structures-coplanar waveguide (CPW), microstrip line (MSL) and narrow microstrip line (tMSL) are used, and 3D simulations are performed using ANSYS HFSS simulator on the PDMS samples which gives the average value of dielectric constant, ε
_r
as equals to 2.65 and loss tangent, tanδ
_εr
as equals to 0.02.