Conductive Carbon-cluster Coated Antenna for Wearable Applications

In this paper, the design of a wearable antenna that uses activated carbon cluster coating as the conducting material is presented. The key aim of the work presented here is to prove the suitability of the conductive coating for a wearable patch antenna fabricated on a denim substrate. The activated carbon clusters were bound to the textile substrate using binder material. The S-11 obtained for the designed carbon cluster wearable patch antenna was -41.86 dB at 2.4 GHz providing a 300 MHz of impedance bandwidth. Hence the proposed antenna exhibits a wider bandwidth, lesser frequency detuning and a return loss improvement of about 20 dB in comparison to a wearable antenna that uses copper foil as the radiating patch. The performance of the proposed antenna was also studied under deformed conditions. Specific Absorption Rate for the antenna was found to be 0.02 W/Kg.