Soft Computing Techniques for Free-Space Measurements of Complex Dielectric Constant

Abstract

A novel method for estimating the dielectric properties of materials by applying different soft computing techniques is presented. Dielectric properties allow us to know other material characteristics such as moisture content, bio-content, chemical concentration, etc., which are of great importance on industrial or science fields. In this paper, we present a free-space measurement method along with soft computing techniques, such as Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and other approaches like Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), for estimating the dielectric properties of materials. The proposed method is validated by measurements and synthetic materials, which were generated to test the performance of these soft computing algorithms.