Design and Numerical Formulation of Metamaterial Sensor for Evaluation of Dielectric Properties of the Materials

Abstract

Metamaterial-based microwave sensor with novel and compact resonator and slotted microstrip transmission line is proposed for efficient measurement of dielectric properties of the materials under test (MUTs). The proposed sensor is designed and simulated on commercially available substrate FR4 by using the ANSYS HFSS Software. A deep notch at -17 dB in the transmission coefficient (S21) is achieved at the resonant frequency of 3.88 GHz. The negative constitutive effective parameters (permittivity and permeability) are extracted from the S-parameters, which is the basic property of metamaterials or left-handed materials (LHMs). The sensitivity analysis is performed by placing various standard materials onto the sensor and measuring the shift in the resonant frequency of the MUTs. A parabolic equation of the proposed sensor is formulated to approximate the resonant frequency and the relative permittivity of the MUTs. A very strong agreement between the simulated and calculated results is found, which reveals that the proposed sensor is very efficient for the measurement of dielectric properties of the MUTs. Error analysis is performed to determine the accuracy of the proposed sensor. A very small percentage of error (0.31) is obtained, which indicates the high accuracy of the proposed sensor.