Measurements of Dielectric Properties of Materials with High Water Content at Millimeter Waves using a Reverberation Chamber

International audienceThis study aims at introducing a method for determining the dielectric properties of lossy materials with high water contents in a millimetre-wave reverberation chamber. Such materials with high water content, e.g. biological tissues can be described by a Debye model. The proposed method consists in fitting the theoretical average absorption cross section to the experiment data resulting from the average absorption cross section measurements. By applying this method on a 4% agar phantom in the 50-65 GHz frequency range, it is demonstrated that the permittivity and conductivity of biological tissues can be determined at millimeter waves using reverberation chamber. The difference between the measured real and imaginary parts and the reference value of the agar phantom is 4.3% and 8%, respectively