Embroidered Transmission Lines with Conductive Yarns: Challenges, Modeling, Fabrication, and Experimental Performance Assessment

Abstract

This paper presents an enhanced measurement technique for evaluating embroidered transmission lines (TLs), based on a TL characterization method. The evaluation metric is the “pure” losses of the embroidered TL excluding mismatch losses. Enhanced mechanical stability and removability of embroidered samples under a test is supported by a specially designed measurement setup. Losses are used to find the effective conductivity of each embroidery pattern. Various embroidered samples are fabricated, measured, and evaluated. The repeatability of measurements and fabrication are analyzed and assessed, resulting in average deviations of 0.5 dB and 0.7 dB, respectively. A comparative evaluation of two different yarns of low and high conductivity is presented. Single and double stitching patterns for each yarn are manufactured with stitch densities of 1–7 lines/mm. For interconnection with SMA connectors, a conductive fabric contact (CFC) was selected as the finish of the TL, as a more practical interface instead of direct yarn contact (YC). The analysis of the measurements proved useful findings, such as an increase in the stitch density or the amount of yarn used does not always improve the performance; the use of double stitching greatly improves low-performance stitch densities; the effective conductivity of embroidery patterns changes with frequency; the YC interface yields more losses for medium stitch densities, but for higher stich densities, it presents an improved performance compared with the CFC interconnection.

Keywords

• conductive yarns
• embroidered textile transmission lines
• measurements
• effective conductivity