The Measurement on the Dielectric Properties of Fresh-Water Ice with Rectangular Waveguide at 2.6GHz-3.9GHz

The complex dielectric permittivity of pure ice is measured using the transmission/reflection method in the rectangular waveguide at frequencies between 2.6GHz and 3.9GHz and over the temperature range from -25 to -2.5degC, in order to extract the influence of temperature and frequency on the dielectric properties of ice quantitatively. The S band of microwave frequency is particularly investigated because of its importance and specialty. The experiments in this study show that the real part of the complex permittivity of pure ice is around 3.16, independent of frequency. The imaginary part changes over the frequency with the nonlinear function and the special frequency point 3.3GHz is found. Two polynomial functions of temperature are selected for the real part and the imaginary part, respectively. The real part increases firstly and then decreases with the increasing temperature, while the imaginary part just monotonously increases with the increasing temperature.