Accurate Simulation of Fabric and Analysis of Antenna Performance on Different Substrate Materials

This paper presents a new way to simulate textile antenna into a real like structure of fabric. The conductive fabric is developed by using a plain weave technique and the chosen type of yarn is copper covered yarn. For simulation, Texgen textile software is used to generate fabric structure in CST. The results of simulated and fabricated textile antenna are compared. Next, two textile antennas of the same size and dimension are tested to compare the performance using two different substrates which are polyester and FR-4. Both antennas have the same size, in terms of patch and substrate but different in substrate material. At the end of the studies, it is noticeable that Texgen software is a reliable software that can indicate the real structure of fabric for textile antenna and this software is able to work together with CST Microwave software. There is a good agreement between simulation and measurement results as the simulation results closely reassemble the fabricated textile antenna results. From this studies, it is important to determine the dielectric constant of the substrate and also others crucial parameters such as thickness of substrate and the substrate tangent loss. Those parameters are crucial as it will affect the performance of the antenna. Throughout this work, the conductive fabric placed on antenna shows that it can radiate signal and able to be applied on textile antenna.