Design and SAR Analysis of a Dual Band Wearable Antenna for WLAN Applications

Abstract

This paper presents the design of three types of dual band (2.5 & 5.2 GHz) wearable microstrip patch antennas. The first one is based on a conventional ground plane, whereas the other two antennas are based on two different types of two-dimensional electromagnetic band gap (EBG) structures. The design of these two different dual-band EBG structures using wearable substrates incorporates several factors in order to improve the performance of the proposed conventional ground plane (dual band) wearable antenna. The second EBG with plus-shaped slots is about 22.7% more compact in size relative to the designed mushroom-like EBG. Subsequently, we have demonstrated that the mushroom-like EBG and the EBG with plus-shaped slots improve the bandwidth by 5.2 MHz and 7.9 MHz at lower resonance frequencies and by 33.6 MHz and 16.7 MHz at higher resonance frequencies, respectively. Furthermore, improvements in gain of 4.33% and 16.5% at a frequency of 2.5 GHz and improvements in gain of 30.43% and 4.57% at 5.2 GHz have been achieved by using the mushroom-like EBG and EBG with plus-shaped slots, respectively. The operation of the conventional ground plane antenna is investigated under different bending conditions, such as wrapped around different rounded body parts. The proposed conventional ground plane antenna is placed over a three-layered (flat body phantom (chest)) and four-layered (rounded body parts) tissue models, and a thorough SAR analysis has been performed. It is concluded that the proposed antenna reduces SAR effects (<2 W/kg) on the human body, thereby making it useful for numerous critical wearable applications.