New methodology to determine the loss tangent of dielectric planar samples by using electrically coupled resonators

Abstract

A new methodology to determine the loss tangent of dielectric planar samples by using electrically coupled resonators is presented. The coupling between the resonators is disrupted by the sample under test (SUT). The proposed methodology is based on the analysis of the equivalent circuit of the sensor in differential and common modes. This work demonstrates that the total quality factor of the electric wall is suitable to determine the losses of the SUT for a wide range of loss tangent values. Additionally, the methodology was experimentally tested with a microstrip sensor and planar samples whose loss tangent values are between 0.000303 and 0.02. The results show that the proposed method achieves an accuracy higher than 97.74%.

Keywords:

• Loss tangent
• coupled resonators
• microstrip sensor
• permittivity measurement

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Conacyt for the support of the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).