Loss-Characterization and Guidelines for Embroidery of Conductive Textiles

The loss-performance of conductive-textile microstrip lines (MLs) is investigated based on their embroidery patterns. We fabricated and tested MLs with different thread alignments and compared their performances with their PCB counterpart. In total, three textile MLs of different thread alignments (90°, 45° and 0° -fill stitches) were fabricated and measured. The MLs were embroidered onto denim fabric using a new class of conductive textile thread, referred to as Elektrisola-7, via an automated embroidery process. The measurements suggested that embroidery patterns (alignments of textile threads) can significantly affect the performance of the embroidered MLs. The textile ML fabricated with 90°-fill stitches exhibited minimum transmission loss, and achieved less than 0.3dB/cm-loss up to 3.5 GHz. This is the first time that different embroidery patterns are studied and reported. The results serve as a reference for future textile design fabrication.