Extracting the electrical properties of polymeric composite materials through circuit simulation and optimization

The electrical properties of polymeric composite materials were extracted from measured data using optimization techniques in Advanced Design System (ADS), a circuit simulation tool. A vector network analyzer was used to measure the S-parameters of the composite materials. The materials were inserted in an X-band waveguide and measured from 8 GHz to 13 GHz. The measured data was used to reconstruct the relative permittivity and loss tangent against a modeled setup in ADS. Two techniques were implemented in the reconstruction of the permittivity, one with the permittivity and loss tangent assumed to be constant and the other with them considered to be a function of frequency. The results show that for both techniques the modeled data does converge to the measured data yielding an optimized permittivity and loss tangent.