Numerical and Experimental Investigation of the Opposite Influence of Dielectric Anisotropy and Substrate Bending on Planar Radiators and Sensors

The simultaneous influences of the substrate anisotropy and substrate bending are numerically and experimentally investigated in this paper for planar resonators on flexible textile and polymer substrates. The pure bending effect has been examined by the help of well-selected flexible isotropic substrates. The origin of the anisotropy (direction-depended dielectric constant) of the woven textile fabrics has been numerically and then experimentally verified by two authorship methods described in the paper. The effect of the anisotropy has been numerically divided from the effect of bending and for the first time it was shown that both effects have almost comparable but opposite influences on the resonance characteristics of planar resonators. After the selection of several anisotropic textile fabrics, polymers, and flexible reinforced substrates with measured anisotropy, the opposite influence of both effects, anisotropy and bending, has been experimentally demonstrated for rectangular resonators. The separated impacts of the considered effects are numerically investigated for more sophisticated resonance structures—with different types of slots, with defected grounds and in fractal resonators for the first three fractal iterations. The bending effect is stronger for the slotted structures, while the effect of anisotropy predominates in the fractal structures. Finally, useful conclusions are formulated and the needs for future research are discussed considering effects in metamaterial wearable patches and antennas.