ON THE APPLICATION OF MICROWAVE CALIBRATION-INDEPENDENT MEASUREMENTS FOR NONINVASIVE THICKNESS EVALUATION OF MEDIUM- OR LOW-LOSS SOLID MATERIALS

Microwave methods require some sort of calibration before physical (thickness, flaw, etc.) and electrical (permittivity, permeability, etc.) measurements of materials. It is always attractive to devise a method which not only eliminates this necessity but also saves time before measurements. Microwave calibration-independent measurements can be utilized for this goal. However, in the literature, these measurements are only applied for electrical measurements of materials. In this research paper, we investigate the performance of microwave calibration-independent measurements for thickness evaluation of dielectric materials to increase the potential of available microwave techniques for thickness evaluation of dielectric materials. We derive an explicit expression for thickness estimation of dielectric materials from calibration-independent measurements for the adopted calibration-independent technique. We also propose a criterion for increasing the performance of measurements. We conducted thickness measurements of six dielectric specimens with different lengths to validate the derived expressions and the proposed criterion for thickness measurements.