期刊名称:International Journal of Antennas and Propagation
印刷版ISSN:1687-5869
电子版ISSN:1687-5877
出版年度:2012
卷号:2012
DOI:10.1155/2012/972696
出版社:Hindawi Publishing Corporation
摘要:A planar antenna for ultra-wideband (UWB) applications
covering the 3.1–10.6 GHz range has been designed as a
test bed for efficiency measurements of antennas manufactured
using polymer conductors. Two types of conductive polymers,
PEDOT and PPy (polypyrrole), with very different thicknesses
and conductivities have been selected as conductors for the
radiating elements. A comparison between measured radiation
patterns of the conductive polymers and a copper reference
antenna allows to estimate the conductor losses of the two
types of conductive polymers. For a 158 μm thick PPy polymer,
an efficiency of almost 80% can be observed over the whole
UWB spectrum. For a 7 μm thick PEDOT layer, an average
efficiency of 26.6% demonstrates, considering the room for
improvement, the potential of this type of versatile materials as
flexible printable alternative to conductive metallic paints. The
paper demonstrates that, even though the PEDOT conductivity
is an order of magnitude larger than that of PPy, the thicker
PPy layer leads to much higher efficiency over the whole UWB
frequency range. This result highlights that high efficiency can
be achieved not only through high conductivity, but also through
a sufficiently thick layer of conductive polymers.