Reliability of Passive Printed Dipole Antennas Under Extreme Environments

We report flexible dipole antenna designs fabricated using screen printing with a stretchable and conductive CI-1036 silver ink on PDMS that operates at 4.9 GHz. To study the impacts of the surface roughness and skin effect on radio frequency antenna performance, the RMS surface roughness of the straight and serpentine dipole patterns were measured using optical profilometry to be 1.298 and 1.141 µm, respectively. During temperature testing, the serpentine dipole antenna displayed a lower shift in resonant frequency than the straight configuration of 31.4 % for high temperature (80°C > T > 110°C) and 60.2 % for low temperature (−71°C < T < −31°C). COMSOL Multiphysics was used to simulate the effects of thermal expansion on both antenna designs, the serpentine geometry was found to be more resistant to temperature change than the straight dipole.