This work presents an efficient design and optimization method based on characteristic mode analysis (CMA) to predict the resonance and gain of wideband antennas made from flexible materials. Known as the even mode combination (EMC) method based on CMA, the forward gain is estimated based on the principle of summing the electric field magnitudes of the first even dominant modes of the antenna. To demonstrate its effectiveness, two compact, flexible planar monopole antennas designed on different materials and two different feeding methods are presented and analyzed. The first planar monopole is designed on Kapton polyimide substrate and fed using a coplanar waveguide to operate from 2 to 5.27 GHz (measured). On the other hand, the second antenna is designed on felt textile and fed using a microstrip line to operate from about 2.99 to 5.57 GHz (measured). Their frequencies are selected to ensure their relevance in operating across several important wireless frequency bands, such as 2.45 GHz, 3.6 GHz, 5.5 GHz, and 5.8 GHz. On the other hand, these antennas are also designed to enable competitive bandwidth and compactness relative to the recent literature. Comparison of the optimized gains and other performance parameters of both structures are in agreement with the optimized results from full wave simulations, which process is less resource-efficient and more iterative.
Keywords: characteristic mode analysis; even mode combination; flexible antennas; wideband antennas.