Dielectric Properties Measurement of Biological Materials Using Non-Destructive Sensors

Abstract

The authors' research work has for objective the study of a sensor with planar resonator for applications in the non-destructive control. In this context, two approaches were defined. In a first part, a conception, a modeling, a simulation with commercial software (HFSS, CST), a realization and measurements were treated on Rectangular Patch Resonators (RPR). The proposed theoretical analysis is based on the Moment Method (MoM) via the Galerkin's approach, in which three types of entire domain basis functions are used to expand the patch currents. While, the first two types of basic functions involve a set of sinusoidal cavity modes without edge conditions (sbf-wo-ec) and with edge conditions (sbf-w-ec), and in order to incorporate the edge conditions (cp-ec), the third one consists of Chebyshev polynomials combinations with weighting factors. These last ones as well as the Green Dyadic spectral functions are efficiently implanted with compact Fortran 90 codes. Two EM commercial software HFSS and CST was used to validate the proposed RPR prototypes. The exactness of the obtained results is estimated using four prototypes operating near 6 GHz, taking into account only the fundamental mode resonant frequency. The theoretical model is compared with the simulations and the measurement results. The second approach of the authors' work which is developed in this paper is focused on the characterization of biological materials in vitro using the RPR prototypes proposed as applicator in the non-destructive control and the medical domain to find the abnormalities of these tissues such as: eczema, psoriasis, cancer, etc. The authors' center of interest will be managed towards the dielectric properties of the biological material to extract the relative permittivity and the loss factor on several samples (liver, fat, chicken, butter, foie gras, etc.).