A Flexible PVA/CaCO3 Dielectric Film for Microwave Antenna Applications

This work presents the fabrication of a biodegradable dielectric substrate material for microwave applications. Water soluble Poly(Vinyl Alcohol) (PVA) with naturally available calcium carbonate based dielectric films were synthesized using solution casting method. The physical properties of PVA based composite film can be tuned by adding CaCO
₃
particles. The PVA substrate with degradable composition has a thickness of 1.3 mm with dielectric properties (ε
_r
= 1.64, tan δ = 0.039) measured at S-band frequency using cavity perturbation method. As a proof of concept, on the synthesized PVA/CaCO
₃
composite film, a printed dipole antenna is fabricated and designed to operating at 2.45 GHz. This PVA composite film is robust, flexible and has the potential to replace non-biodegradable materials with good promising material properties.