Design, calibration and data interpretation for a one-port large coaxial dielectric measurement cell

There are many techniques available for measuring the dielectric properties of materials. The one-port reflection coefficient method is one of the simplest techniques for this application. In this paper a large coaxial cell is described with emphasis on how it was designed, constructed and calibrated over the frequency range from 50 MHz to 1 GHz. This cell is much larger than commercially available ones and suitable for the dielectric property measurements of a wide range of liquid and solid materials. An improved technique that employs a minimization scheme to extract the dielectric properties of the sample is presented. Measurements have demonstrated that this system is efficient and accurate for determining the dielectric properties of various materials over a broad frequency band.