Material Characterization of Arbitrarily Shaped Dielectrics Based on Reflected Pulse Characteristics

The relative permittivity of materials is extracted using time domain radar pulse reflection measurements. The pulse reflected from an arbitrarily shaped dielectric object is compared with that reflected from its metallic equivalent to determine the object's dielectric constant. The proposed method achieves accuracies of over 85% for permittivity and within 2 mm for material thickness estimations. Using the proposed technique, the complex relative permittivity for various objects is extracted over a frequency range from 3 to 10 GHz. This method has been applied to determine the permittivity of a ridge of sand and to dielectric imaging.