Liquid crystal-reconfigurable conformal monopole antennas structures for microwave applications

In this article, the design of conformal monopole antennas on a very thin layer of flexible liquid crystals (LCs) is introduced. The flexible LC substrate can be bent and folded over the module case, resulting in a tight integration of the antenna with the frontend module. Firstly, a meander monopole antenna, designed for single band operation, is presented with details of the structure, simulation and measurement results. Secondly, a method to increase the peak gain and decrease the return loss of the antenna is proposed. The simulated results are compared with measured data, and good agreement is obtained.   Key words: Liquid crystals, monopole antennas, agile structure, microwave.

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