Contribution to the characterization of stratified structures : electromagnetic analysis of a coaxial cell and a microstrip line

The objective of this dissertation is the development of electromagnetic modelling software specific to the cells of microwave material characterization. This development is based on numerical methods that are alternative to finite element method which is widely used in commercial software. For the need to extract the properties of materials by inverse modelling methods, research into the numerical efficiency of direct analysis is the focus in this thesis. The characterization targeted cells in this work concern a coaxial cell and a planar line. The presence of an unknown material is modelled by a stratified heterogeneous transmission structure. The application of the transverse operator method (TOM) on the multi-layered coaxial cell allowed the determination of the propagation constant of fundamental mode and its corresponding field distribution of the electromagnetic fields, and the characteristics of higher-order modes for the need of the characterization of discontinuities between empty line and loaded line. In the case of the microstrip line, the use of the modified transverse resonance method (MTRM) allowed the determination of characteristics of the fundamental and higher order modes. Since each cell consists of several different sections, the matrix S of the set will be determined by the use of the several modal methods, such as modal connection method (''mode matching'') and multimodal variational method (MVM). The direct analysis codes are coupled with several optimization programs to constitute the software for extracting the material parameters. These are applied to material samples in cylinder form holed by the coaxial cell, or thin rectangular wafer by the microstrip line. Broadband extraction results were obtained, values are comparable with those published. Both high-loss dielectrics and nanostructured materials have been studied by our method