A New Material for Flexible Antennas

This paper reports for the first time, the use of natural rubber as a substrate in the design of flexible antennas. Three inset feed patch antennas with different dimensions were simulated to resonate for 8 and 10 GHz. The rubber samples were prepared using two different amounts of carbon at 20 and 25 % to alter the dielectric properties. Investigations were done to understand the effects of natural rubber properties with the aim to facilitate efforts in flexible antenna design so that practical system requirements are met. The rest of this paper focuses on the effect of rubber properties on the antenna bandwidth, return loss and radiation patterns. From the results, it was observed that increasing the filler content and frequency would increase the antenna losses, but enhances the bandwidth, gain and directivity. This implies that the performance of rubber-based antennas can be controlled by the dielectric properties of rubber.