International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882

Volume 4, Issue 10, October 2015

1056

Wearable Textile Materials with tuning holes for Minkowski Fractal

Patch Antenna
Syed Uvaid Ullah1
Electronics & Communication
Aisect University
Bhopal, India

ABSTRACT
This paper discusses the design of a WIFI textile wearable antenna in Body Area Network (BAN).
Tuning holes addresses the issues of small size, wide
bandwidth and low conductive loss in particular. Due
to its vital permit, tuning holes serves well to be a
choice as a wearable antenna for on-body communication system. The proposed design is simulated in CST
Microwave Studio (CST MWS). The prototype is a
textile-based construction offering a wide impedance
bandwidth. Detailed tests and measurements carried
out using a full-body phantom are reported in this paper.
Key word: Tuning Hole, Electro-Textile.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Many antenna designs have been proposed for

body centric Communication networks [1-5], but so far
tuning holes have not yet been employed for wearable
application. Microstrip antennas have also been investigated as wearable Antennas [5-8]. However, Microstrip antennas have narrow Bandwidth. But they need
to be mounted on a body part that is less vulnerable to
bending and wrinkling [8]. Hence, an alternative tuning holes option is investigated in this paper. The tuning holes is placed above a fabric substrate and knitted
metallic ground plane with a suitable feed mechanism.
The wearable tuning holes design simulation has an
impedance bandwidth of 39% while the prototype exhibits 40%.
In section II of the paper, material used for
constituent components of the antenna, its simulation
in CST MWS and its prototyping along with VNA
measurements are shown and discussed. Section III
discusses the tests and measurements of the two antenna prototypes in terms of |S21|2 (dB) while the antennas are mounted on a full-body dry phantom. Section
IV concluded the research work discussed in this paper
mentioning the possible future extensions to the research

Dr. R. K. Baghel 2
Electronics & Communication
Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology
Bhopal, India

II.

ANTENNMAA TERIALS AND FABFXATION

For our textile antenna we chose a polyamide

spacer fabric with 2.85mm thickness as substrate. Such
a substrate possesses several advantages compared to
other fabrics. It is light with good derivability while
being dimensionally stable in height. Due to the high
fraction of air, a permittivity close to one is expected.
We used techniques explained in [3] in order to extract
the exact permittivity of the textile substrate. This
technique utilizes S-parameter measurements of two
Microstrip transmission lines of different lengths.
Knowing the length difference and the S-parameters, a
permittivity E, of 1.15 +/-0.02 at a frequency of
2.45GHz was extracted for the spacer fabric.
We used an aluminum foil as conductive material for the patch as well as for the ground plane.
Aluminum shows high resistance against oxidation and
corrosion, which is important to guarantee good and
stable conductivity among the woven threads. The
patch and the ground plane were attached to the spacer
fabric using ammonia-based textile glue whereas the
electrical connection to a SMA jack was established
with conductive two-component glue. The textile glue
Showed negligible influence on the sheet resistance
since the plated textile is densely woven. On the other
hand, the electrical resistance of the conductive glue is
much smaller than the resistance of the plated textile
and therefore, negligible as well. Antenna and transmission lines for extraction of permittivity were constructed in the same manner.

III.

DESIGN TECHNIQUE OF MINKOWSKI FRACTAL PATCH ANTENNA

A miniaturization of loop antenna using the

fractal technique is known as Minkowski square loop
antenna [7]. The fractal antenna was created by using
the initial square pulse (SP) to iterate at each side of
the loop.

www.ijsret.org

International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882
Volume 4, Issue 10, October 2015

VI.

Fig1: Minkowski square loop with two iterations

IV.

DESIGN AND SIMULATION

MATERIAL USED AND DIMENSIONS

FRACTAL GEOMETRY ANTENNA

STRUCTURE

Now the formed antenna structure is fed by an

aperture using Microstrip line. The Microstrip feeder
line dimensions are taken for 50 ohm characteristic
impedance.Antenna structure design started with rectangular shape of size 38mm X 48.4mm X 0.1524 mm
Flectron with Indentation factor of 0.5 and iterated for
the 2 times over the substrate of dimension 120 mm X
120 mm X 2.85 mm and with same size of ground
plane however the material and thickness of the
ground plane are same as of patch

For tuning holes simulation, the commercial

package CST-MWS is used. The simulator incorporates Perfect Boundary Approximation (PBA) and
Thin Sheet Techniques (TST) which enhances the simulator accuracy as compared to other conventional
simulators. Transient solver of the simulator is employed for the simulation of this tuning holes and the
calculation of results [9]. The feed for the textile antenna takes the form of a Microstrip line. In the following text, complete details regarding the material, dimensions and steps followed to construct the prototype
are discussed.

V.

Fig2: Structure of antenna with tuning holes

VII.

PERFORMANCE
CHARACTERISTICS OF 0th ITERATION

Table I depicts the material used as well as

their dimensions. The shapes of the constituent components are indicated in the table; however there are a
few modifications that are made to suit the requirement of the design.

Fig 3: Zero iteration design of Minkowski fractal geometry

Table1 depicts the material used as well as their dimensions. The tuning holes initially discussed in [10]
are designed using a probe feed and metallic ground
plane. But for the design to be implemented on textile
it is important to make appropriate changes. Using a
probe in the fabric feed may be very unstable from the
construction point of view. Therefore, a Microstrip
feed structure is used. The altered design is shown in
Fig. 1.The simulated results of reflection coefficient of
the Microstrip-fed tuning holes are shown in Fig. 2. It
shows that the -10dB bandwidth ranges from 1 GHz to
6GHz. The impedance bandwidth is thus 39%.

1057

Fig 4: S11-Parameter at Zero iteration of Minkowski

Fractal geometry.
www.ijsret.org

International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882
Volume 4, Issue 10, October 2015

VIII.

PERFORMANCE
CHARACTERISTICS OF 1st ITERATION

Fig 5: 1st iteration design of Minkowski fractal geometry

X.

1058

PERFORMANCE
CHARACTERISTICS OF PROPOSED ITERATION

Fig 9: proposed iteration design of Minkowski fractal

geometry.

Fig 6: S11-Parameter at 1st iteration of Minkowski

fractal geometry.

IX.

PERFORMANCE
CHARACTERISnd
TICS OF 2 ITERATION

Fig 10: S11-Parameter at proposed iteration of Minkowski fractal geometry.

XI.

Fig 7: 2nd iteration design of Minkowski fractal geometry.

CONCLUSION

In this paper a wearable electro-textile patch

antenna is designed by using Minkowski fractal geometries with tuning hole for 0th, 1st and 2nd iterations.
In the 1st and 2nd iterations the fractal geometry parameters are fine tuned for WIBRO and GSM 1900
bands. The proposed antenna show a significant size
reduction compared to the conventional Microstrip
patch antenna. The size of antenna is reduced to
20.212% at second iteration from the predictable
patch. A predictable rectangular Microstirp patch antenna has been successfully designed having a central
frequency of 2.4 GHz. The results shows that the designed antenna provides gives good performance characteristics in all the three frequency bands and the
tuning hole could be used to fine tune the antenna
without increasing the complexity and compromising
the rigidness of structure. Hence, the designed antenna
is compact enough to be placed in typical wireless devices.

Fig 8: S11-Parameter at 2nd iteration of Minkowski

Fractal geometry.
www.ijsret.org

International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882
Volume 4, Issue 10, October 2015

REFERENCES
[1] Hao, Y., Hall, P.S., On-body antennas and propagation: Recent development, IEICE Transactions on
Communications E91-B (6), pp.1682-1688, 2008
[2] A. Alomainy, Y. Hao, A. Owadally, C.G. Parini, Y.
Nechayev, C.C.Constantinou, and P.S. Hall, Statistical analysis and performance evaluation for on-body
radio propagation with microstrip patch antennas,
IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagation, vol.55, no.1,
pp.245248, 2007.
[3] A. Alomainy, Y. Hao, C.G. Parini, and P.S. Hall,
Comparison between two different antennas for UWB
on-body propagation measurements, IEEE Antennas
and Wireless Propagation Letters,vol.4, pp.3134,
2005.
[4] Klemm, M., and G. Troester, Textile UWB Antennas for WirelessBody Area Networks, IEEE
Transactions on Antennas andPropagation, September
2005.
[5] Gareth A. Conway, Simon L. Cotton, and William
G. Scanlon, AnAntennas and Propagation Approach
to Improving Physical LayerPerformance in Wireless
Body Area Networks, IEEE Journal onselected areas
in communications, Vol. 27, no. 1, January 2009.
[6] C. Hertleer, H. Rogier and L. Van Langenhove, A
Textile Antenna forProtective Clothing, IET Seminar
Digest 2007 (11803), pp. 44-46,2007.

1059

[7] Pekka Salonen and Lauri Sydanheimo Antenna

design for wearableapplications, 2002.
[8] Hertleer, C., Rogier, H., Vallozzi, L., Van Langenhove, L, A textileantenna for off-body communication integrated into protective clothing for firefighters, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation,
pp.919-925, 2009.
[9] CST Microwave Studio Manuals
[10] L.Z. Thamae and Z Wu, Broadband bowtie dielectric resonatorantenna, IEEE Transaction of Antenna and Propagation, accepted 18th July 2009.2010
Loughborough Antennas & Propagation Conference 89 November 2010, Loughborough, UK352
[11] Microstrip patches antennas, A designers
guide, by Rodney B. Waterhouse, 2003.
[12] Gianvittorio, J. P. and Y. Rahmat-Samii, Fractal
antennas: A novel antenna miniaturization technique,
and applications, IEEEAntennas Propagation Magazine, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2036, 2002.

www.ijsret.org