Design of Flexible Textile-Based UWB Antenna for Microwave Breast Tumor Detection

A wearable textile antenna designed to be biocompatible, flexible, lightweight, and compact is present in the paper. As the body is not flat but curvy, a sensor antenna is required which could adapt to the body surface making it a wearable antenna. Antennas, usually used, are made of FR-4 substrates which are rigid and robust. This property of FR-4 makes it difficult to wrap around the breast surface. Cotton, denim and felt are suitable, flexible, and inventive substrate for wearable textile antennas because of its special blend of mechanical, electrical, and aesthetic qualities. In the fields including health monitoring, RFID, the Internet of Things, and communications where comfort, adaptability, and durability are essential, denim-based antennas have proven to be effective. Another application is in breast tumor detection for microwave imaging. In microwave imaging, image resolution is crucial in detecting tumor traces and thus needs an ultra-wide bandwidth antenna. The antenna fabricated using a denim substrate operates with a percentage bandwidth of 142.119% or fractional bandwidth of 1.42119, broadside gain of 4.3317 dB, return loss of (− 29.6dB to -39.51dB) and an impedance matching of 50 Ω. The fabricated antenna uses conducting materials such as copper tape, copper fabric and bare conductive electric paint as conducting medium. Though these antennae made of denim material offer attractive antenna characteristics like other robust antennas and their flexibility of the antenna helps them to adapt to the curve surface of the human body. As denim is the most common material used it makes it user friendly to be worn. This antenna is designed using a High-Frequency Structure Simulator. Using a Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) the antenna is tested.