A Wideband Free Space Material Characterization Method for Extracting Dielectric Permittivity

The extraction of dielectric properties of materials has been central to the antennas and propagation community, especially since the introduction of metamaterials and/or engineered materials with desired electromagnetic response. These materials can help with enhancing the performance of existing designs and provide capabilities that are unobtainable with conventional materials. As such, it becomes very important to characterize these new materials and through measurements, extract their dielectric properties with a high degree of certainty. Here, we propose a non-destructive and easy to implement methodology for characterizing the dielectric properties of different types of materials, including two types of Radiation Absorbent Materials (RAM) and extract the corresponding effective dielectric permittivity for each case in the 10 - 18 GHz range.