Single Layer Permittivity Extraction from Multilayered Biaxial Anisotropic Media Using a Rectangular Waveguide
Abstract
Electromagnetic characterization of layered biaxial media is a critical step in the design of modern low observable (LO) coatings, and with the advent of 3D printing technology it is now possible to design and create myriad different such materials. Biaxial materials are of specific interest due to the flexibility they provide for control over magnitude, phase, and polarization of the material systems response to interrogating electromagnetic (EM) energy. This research effort, rather than being concerned with the exhaustive characterization of a material, which has been previously done, is instead concerned with empirically proving a technique for extracting the constitutive parameters e and of a specific biaxial material layer from experimentally measured scattering parameters of an entire multilayered biaxial material system. Towards this aim, a rectangular waveguide is used with several samples irradiated at X-band frequencies. The method explored in the research herein shows that the individual layers of a multilayered biaxial anisotropic dielectric material can be successfully characterized and extracted from the overall system, thus providing a valuable technique for characterizing complex layered material coatings.