Assessment of Kapton-based flexible antenna for near field wireless energy transfer

• Main Authors: Misran, M. H., Rahim, S. K. A., Eteng, A. A., Vandenbosch, G. A. E.
• Format: Article
• Published: Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society (ACES) 2017
• Subjects: TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering
• Online Access: http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/75319/; https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85014519270&partnerID=40&md5=1ef4dd56229501860668e5446411ad69

This letter presents the design of a flexible highly efficient antenna for Wireless Energy Transfer (WET) at 13.56 MHz. The proposed antenna uses very thin kapton, with a thickness of 25 μm as a substrate, and an 18 μm layer of copper as the conductive material. The 40 mm x 40 mm 6 loop antenna produces almost 90% ETE (energy transfer efficiency) and a bandwidth (BW) of almost 4 MHz for inductive wireless communications. This flexible antenna is suitable for use in small mobile devices, for wireless charging and communication purposes at the NFC operating frequency. In addition, kapton offers very high durability, high mechanical strength, and unique distortional resistance to harsh environments and corrosive aqueous etchants, in this way increasing the reliability of the antenna.