Engineered Carbon-Nanotubes-Based Composite Material for RF Applications

Electrical properties of nanocomposite materials are extracted to investigate the possibility to engineer novel material for microwave applications. A measurement setup is developed to characterize material in a powder form. The developed measurement technique is applied on nanoparticles of alumina, carbon nanotubes (CNTs), and composite mixture of carbon nanotubes and alumina. The effect of packing density on dielectric constant and loss tangent is thoroughly characterized experimentally. The obtained results show that the real part of effective permittivity may be considerably enhanced by increasing the percentage of conducting nanoparticles. In addition, it is possible to decrease the loss in a material by mixing low-loss dielectric nanoparticles powder in a lossy material.