Reliable Lab-Scale Construction Process for Electromagnetically Coupled Textile Microstrip Patch Antennas for the 2.45 GHz ISM Band

A precise layer alignment is crucial to ensure performance repeatability of multilayer microstrip antennas. We introduce a novel lab-scale construction process for multilayer microstrip textile patch antennas that consists in combining an alignment method, based on laser-cut wood frames to perform accurate layer alignment, with a fast intralayer attachment method, based on thermally activated adhesive sheets. This lab-scale construction process is validated with an electromagnetically coupled microstrip rectangular patch textile antenna operating in the 2.45 GHz ISM band. It has been reproduced eight times to validate the proposed construction process. The differences between desired simulated versus measured average values of the resonant frequencies, impedance bandwidths, gains, and total efficiencies equal 6.25 MHz, 21.5 MHz, 0.6 dBi, and 4.45%, respectively. Moreover, the standard deviations of measured resonant frequencies, impedance bandwidths, gains, and total efficiencies equal 24.54 MHz, 14.02 MHz, 0.15 dBi, and 3.57%, respectively. These results confirm that the novel lab-scale construction process provides good performance repeatability of multilayer microstrip textile patch antennas.