BROADBAND MEASUREMENT OF COMPLEX PERMITTIVITY OF COMPOSITE AT MICROWAVE FREQUENCIES USING SCALAR SCATTERING PARAMETERS

A shielded, conductor-backed coplanar waveguide technique is used to determine the complex permittivity and loss tangent of nano magnetic composite materials over X-band. The test composite material is synthesized by reinforcing cobalt ferrite particles with average crystallite diameter 7.36 nm in low density polyethylene matrix with 2% and 4% volume fractions. The complex permittivity for low density polyethylene matrix and the composite samples, evaluated from the present technique at 9.887 GHz, are verified with cavity perturbation technique resonating at the same frequency. A new mathematical approach, using element-to-element correspondence of the ABCD matrix, is applied to calculate the complex propagation constant. The formulation facilitates evaluation of complex propagation constant over the test frequency range using scalar scattering parameters without altering the coplanar waveguide geometry. The mathematical formulation is verified by performing permittivity measurements for air over the X-band.