PROGETTO E FABBRICAZIONE DI UN'ANTENNA PLANARE COMPATTA E FLESSIBILE

This thesis work details on the fabrication and characterization of a CPW-fed circular planar antenna on a flexible PEN substrate. In particular, two prototype antennas have been designed and fabricated exploiting the Screen Printing technique and a Multi-material 3D printer. The antennas have been characterized in terms of the Scattering parameters S_11 on flat and curved surfaces through polystyrene cylinders, with different bending radii. In parallel, the possibility to exploit the antenna as sensor, depositing few water drops on it, has been also investigated and the experimental results have shown that the prototypes are highly sensitive to the change of the drop numbers. The proposed antennas on flexible substrates could be integrated with FBAR sensor-resonators, acting as a Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO), or directly as sensing elements in wearable systems.