Measurements of complex permittivity of geological materials mixtures at RF frequencies

This paper presents a measurement technique specifically developed to address the problem of measuring the complex permittivity of mixtures of geological materials at RF frequencies (10MHz-1GHz). The main challenge of measuring this kind of mixtures is that each component could have a different state of aggregation (solid, liquid) and conglomeration (e.g. homogeneous, porous, granular). The paper describes the data acquisition as well as the processing technique, reporting some examples of results that show the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach to different kind of geological materials mixtures.