Low-cost thin film patch antennas and antenna arrays with various background wall materials for indoor wireless communications
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A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
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en
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21
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Flexible and Printed Electronics, Volume 8, issue 2
Abstract
The present study introduces an inkjet-printed flexible coplanar waveguide patch antenna array concept. Single antenna and four-element antenna arrays were characterized, which were attached to a subminiature version A connector via an innovative solderless, 3D-printed ‘plug-and-play-type’ tightener. Furthermore, indoor wireless communication and Internet of Things scenarios with commonly used wall materials including gypsum and plywood boards, on which patch antennas and antenna arrays can be attached, were also presented. In order to validate the concept, design and fabrication iterations in parallel with numerical and experimental investigations were executed. To elaborate, single antenna and antenna array configurations without and with wall materials were characterized to see their functionality at 2.4 GHz resonance frequency and beyond 300 MHz bandwidth, respectively. The results demonstrate that the investigated configurations fulfill short-range radio transmission and can be utilized, e.g., for indoor backscattering-type communications and wireless sensing applications, as an affordable and versatile alternative to their conventional counterparts. Being attached to their corresponding background materials, single-antenna specimens were measured to have return losses beyond 18 dB and peak gains around 1 dBi, while higher peak gains above 6 dBi were detected for antenna arrays. Moreover, the antenna arrays can enable multiple-input and multiple-output communication. The proposed arrays had diversity performance in terms of return losses higher than 15 dB, isolation of more than 20 dB, envelope correlation coefficient < 0.001 , diversity gain > 9.95 dB, mean effective gain < − 3 dB, power ratio factor < 0.5 dB, and channel capacity loss < 0.4 bits/s/Hz.Description
Funding Information: The authors appreciate Matti Vaaja, Timi Lehtola, Clemens Icheln, Jan Bergman, and Bing Xue for their support in experiments and discussions. The authors also acknowledge the funding through Academy of Finland BESIMAL (Decision No. 334197), WALLPAPER (Decision No. 352912), and Aalto University, Department of Information and Communications Engineering. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd.
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Kerminen, J, Xie, B, Mela, L, Karakoç, A, Ruttik, K & Jäntti, R 2023, 'Low-cost thin film patch antennas and antenna arrays with various background wall materials for indoor wireless communications', Flexible and Printed Electronics, vol. 8, no. 2, 025013. https://doi.org/10.1088/2058-8585/accd05