Fast Measurements of Dielectric Properties with Small Size Microwave Transceiver

The dielectric properties of biological tissues are fundamental for the design of electromagnetic medical devices as well as in non-ionizing radiation dosimetry studies. In recent studies, dielectric data has been typically collected using the open-ended coaxial probe and the vector network analyzer (VNA) setup. In this work, we replace the traditional swept frequency VNA from this setup with a more compact microwave transceiver. The microwave transceiver uses a novel broadband, multi-tone source and broadband receivers to capture the instantaneous S-parameters at multiple tones simultaneously. We conducted dielectric properties measurements on standard liquids which have known dielectric properties using our modified setup and compared the results with the theoretical values. We also conducted the same measurements with the typical setup which includes the swept frequency VNA and compared the performances of the two measurement setups. We concluded that the microwave transceiver can provide faster measurement speeds than the conventional VNA without sacrificing measurement precision and accuracy.