Super Wideband (SWB) Fractal Based Flexible Monopole Antenna for Ultra Wideband (UWB) Applications.

For the first time, paper-based SWB fractal monopole antenna is presented. A miniaturized SWB monopole, which deploys a fractal radiator, is the smallest reported paper-based SWB monopole antenna to date. It is shown that fractal made of iterations of a flower shaped slot inside a circular metallic patch provides a successful method of reducing size while retaining or enhancing antenna performance. This paper presents the design of SWB monopole antenna for flexible applications and is validated for UWB applications. The proposed antenna has a wide impedance bandwidth (-10 dB bandwidth) from 3.3 GHz to frequency over 30 GHz. The aforementioned antenna with a compact size 18 mm × 24 mm is designed and fabricated on a paper substrate of 0.5 mm thickness. The main features like environment friendly, flexibility, green electronics applications and low cost of fabrication are the key factors for this proposed antenna. The proposed antenna has a 14-dB bandwidth from 3.9 GHz to 13.1 GHz, which is suitable for UWB outdoor propagation. Bending measurements have been performed to validate the flexibility of the prototype under extremely bent condition of bent radius 10 mm. The possible applications cover WLAN, C-band, Ku-band, K-band operations, WiMAX and ISM band. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]