Open Access

ARTICLE

Inkjet Printed Metamaterial Loaded Antenna for WLAN/WiMAX Applications

Farhad Bin Ashraf¹, Touhidul Alam^2,*, Md Tarikul Islam³, Mandeep Jit Singh³, Norbahiah Binti Misran³, Mohammad Tariqul Islam³

1 Department of Electrical Engineering, Polytechnique Montréal, Montréal, QC H3T 1J4, Canada
2 Space Science Centre (ANGKASA), Institute of Climate Change (IPI), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, 43600, Selangor, Malaysia
3 Department of Electrical, Electronic and Systems Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia

* Corresponding Author: Touhidul Alam. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2022, 71(2), 2271-2284. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2022.021751

Received 13 July 2021; Accepted 01 September 2021; Issue published 07 December 2021

Abstract

In this paper, the design and performance analysis of an Inkjet-printed metamaterial loaded monopole antenna is presented for wireless local area network (WLAN) and worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) applications. The proposed metamaterial structure consists of two layers, one is rectangular tuning fork-shaped antenna, and another layer is an inkjet-printed metamaterial superstate. The metamaterial layer is designed using four split-ring resonators (SRR) with an H-shaped inner structure to achieve negative-index metamaterial properties. The metamaterial structure is fabricated on low-cost photo paper substrate material using a conductive ink-based inkjet printing technique, which achieved dual negative refractive index bands of 2.25–4.25 GHz and 4.3–4.6 GHz. The antenna is designed using a rectangular tuning fork structure to operate at WLAN and WiMAX bands. The antenna is printed on 30 × 39 × 1.27 mm3 Rogers RO3010 substrate, which shows wide impedance bandwidth of 0.75 GHz (2.2 to 2.95 GHz) with 2 dB realized gain at 2.4 GHz. After integrating metamaterial structure, the impedance bandwidth becomes 1.25 GHz (2.33 to 3.58 GHz) with 2.6 dB realized gain at 2.4 GHz. The antenna bandwidth and gain have been increased using developed quad SRR based metasurface by 500 MHz and 0.6 dBi respectively. Moreover, the proposed quad SRR loaded antenna can be used for 2.4 GHz WLAN bands and 2.5 GHz WiMAX applications. The contribution of this work is to develop a cost-effective inject printed metamaterial to enhance the impedance bandwidth and realized the gain of a WLAN/WiMAX antenna.

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