Eco-Friendly Metamaterial Antenna for 2.4GHz WLAN Applications

Conventional flexible and wearable antennas are currently fabricated with substrates which are neither biodegradable. Another negative point is the use of ecounfriendly processes to produce these circuits thus generating e-waste and causing environment contamination. In this paper, an eco-friendly metamaterial antenna for 2.4 GHz WLAN applications is presented. The rectangular patch antenna is composed of two copper tape layers, one as the radiating element and the other as the modified ground plane with Complementary Split Ring Resonators (CSRR). The substrate that separates these two layers is a mixture of polybutylene adipate-co-terephthalate (PBAT) and polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) polymers, both biodegradable. The electrical characterizations of the mixture were performed using the probe method and the antenna simulations were performed using the commercial software ANSYSO Electronics Desktop. Convergent results were obtained with simulated and measured prototypes, with a measured resonant frequency in 2.44 GHz and bandwidth of 360 MHz, simulated gain of 4.01 dBi and half power beam width of $4\mathrm {S}.2^{\mathrm {o}}$, which shows great potential for WLAN applications.