Analysis of the Electromagnetic Absorption in a New Design of PIFA Antenna Using Metamaterials

This paper presents the design, simulation and fabrication of a miniaturized wearable dual-band antenna put on a rigid substrate and operable at 2.45/5.8 GHz for wireless local area network applications. The electrical and radiation characteristics of the developed antenna were obtained by means of the technical insertion of a slot to tune the operating frequencies. To study the impact of the electromagnetic radiation of the structure of the human body, it is necessary to minimize the back radiation towards the user. Therefore, in this work, a multi-band artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) was placed directly above a dual-band planar inverted F antenna to achieve a miniaturization with excellent radiation performance. The simulations were carried out using the computer simulation technology CST Microwave Studio (CST MWS). A good agreement was achieved between the simulation and experimental results. The comparison of the measurement findings indicates that, when the antenna was backed by the AMC plane, the gain improved from 1.84 to 3.8 dB, in the lower band, and from 2.4 to 4.1 dB in the upper band. The front-to-back ratio of the AMC backed PIFA antenna was also enhanced. Then, to ensure that the proposed AMC structure is harmless to the human body, this prototype was placed on three-layer human tissue cubic model. It was observed that, due to the inclusion of an AMC plane, the peak specific absorption rate (SAR) decreased to 1.45 and 1.1 W/kg at 2.45 and 5.8 GHz, respectively (a reduction of around 3.7 W/kg, compared with an antenna without (AMC).