Investigations on the use of conformal microwave components

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed much interest in the field of conformal electronics from research and development sector Small footprint low cost production ease of fabrication and the influx of affordable flexible substrates make conformal microwave components an attractive prospect for the commercialization of consumer electronics Numerous methods are available in literature for the design of antenna sensor and frequency selective surface Every methodology has its own scale and complexity Planar antennas and sensors available in practice protrude outside the body of the structure resulting in low efficiency and make the profile heavy Flexible antennas and sensors made out of textile fabrics are fragile water absorbent and supine to break Accelerometers based sensors used in literature for motion measurement has low processing speed and sampling rate Tuning usually obtained by adding active elements in the frequency selective surfaces requires complex biasing circuitry Therefore the development of conformal microwave components such as antennas sensors and FSS could be designed compactly with higher efficiency processing speed and portability This thesis examines the use of conformal microwave components such as antennas sensors and frequency selective surface Initially conformal microwave antennas used for remote diagnosis in WBAN and for location tracking in automobiles are designed and developed Performance characterizations of the developed antennas are performed through on structure analysis Further the second part of the thesis discusses the sensor design for human ergonomics newline