Theoretical and experimental broadband tissue-equivalent phantoms at microwave and millimetre-wave frequencies

Several phantoms have been fabricated for reflection measurements from human tissues in the range of 26.5-40 GHz. For the first time, a novel composition is introduced for fabrication of low-cost simple tissue-equivalent phantoms. The effective medium theory is applied to estimate the dielectric properties of phantoms consisting of polyethylene (PE) powder and the results are verified by dielectric properties measurement on the proposed phantoms. It is shown that mixing theory can estimate the dielectric properties of the PE-based phantoms with minimum error. Therefore, the amount of the ingredients can be estimated theoretically.