Embroidered textile antennas

In this chapter, we describe the background and design rules for embroidered textile antennas. Characterization of the embroidered textiles at RF is provided, and several example textile designs are presented and tested for applications related to wearable RF electronics, medical monitoring, and radio frequency identification (RFID). 

In summary, we remark that embroidered textile antennas indeed demonstrated no compromise on antenna performance and efficiency. This is in addition to their... 

Embroidered textile antennas for body-worn UHF communications... 

Among the listed embroidered conductive textiles in Table 10.1, those noted as (6) exhibit the best combination of RF performance, mechanical strength, and load-bearing capability (Wang et ah, 2012b Toyobo Co., Ltd, 2005). In this chapter, we evaluate the RF characteristics of these embroidered E-fibers and their applications to antenna design. Of importance is that the materials used for the dielectric substrate of the embroidered textiles must also preserve the flexibility, integrity, and RF performance of the stmcture. In this chapter, we use polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)... 

Figure 10.19 (a) Flexible embroidered textile dipole antenna and its copper counterpart, (b) measured Sll, and (c) measured realized gain in free space. 

We also evaluated the E-fiber anteima s RF performance when the textile antenna was embroidered on a polyester scarf (see Figure 10.21a). The textile antenna s performance was measured outdoors in windy weather (Wang et al., 2013a), as shown in Figure 10.21a, to ensure repeatable and reliable performance even when the scarf... 

In this section, we designed a flexible multiband antenna based on the aforementioned embroidered textiles. The proposed antenna operates at Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM 850/900 MHz), Personal Communications Service (PCS 1800/ 1900 MHz), and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN 2450 MHz) bands. As demonstrated in Wang et al. (2014), an important aspect of this antenna is the loaded loop. 

Figure 10.22 (a) Embroidered multiband textile antenna using E-fibers, and measured and simulated RF performance of the textile antenna in free space (b) Sll, (c) realized gain, and (d) radiation patterns. 

Table 10.4 Threshold power test of embroidered RFID textile antenna...

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