Design and Simulation of Flower Shaped Flexible Wideband Antenna for WBAN Applications

This paper deals with designing and simulating a miniaturized Ultra-wideband (UWB) flower-shaped radiator antenna that operates over 3.69 GHz to 22 GHz frequency range for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) application. To achieve the wideband, two alterations have been incorporated in the proposed design i.e. (i) adopting a flower shaped patch -to enhance the bandwidth by increasing the perimeter of radiating patch and (ii) a quarter elliptical ground plane which leads to reduce capacitive effect, hence this increase impedance matching in the operating band. The Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) dielectric material was used to design a flexible antenna. PDMS is highly flexible and mechanically tunable. The flexibility of the proposed structure has been analyzed by curving the antenna along the X and Y axis at different angles. Various performance parameters like return loss, gain, and antenna radiation pattern are evaluated at different bending angles. The antenna parameters were also assessed under human proximity in terms of Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) with a three-layered human model. The analyzed average SAR at different frequencies like 4.6 GHz, 10.6 GHz, and 15.5 GHz with 100 mW input power are 1.58 W/kg, 1.04W/Kg, and 0.816 W/Kg, respectively.