Development of Ultra-Wideband Textile-Based Metamaterial Absorber for mm-wave Band Applications

This work presents a state-of-the-art development of an ultrawide absorber for wearable smart electronic textile applications. The design is based on a novel cell geometry that is previously developed and applied for RF energy harvesting applications. Different textile types were considered in this study, namely, Felt, Denim and Polyester and the achieved-10 dB reflective fractional bandwidths are about 42.828%, 43.65%, and 42.834% respectively. A comparison with traditional counterparts (FR-4 and Rogers dielectrics) shows that the bandwidth exhibited by textile materials is greatly wider. The bending effect of the textile materials is considered in this study and found that the-10 dB bandwidth is inversely proportional with the decrease in the surface curvature of the material. Compared to the currently developed absorbers and similar structures reported in the literature show that the current design is more compact, lighter, and more efficient in terms of the absorptivity. The current results can be considered as starting promising steps for the development of ultra-wideband electronic textiles-based applications such as energy harvesting, health monitoring, smart materials, sensors, and infrared camouflage.