Characterization of the effective conductivity in radio frequency of additive manufacturing materials

This work presents the characterization of the effective conductivity of additive manufacturing materials used for the fabrication of high-frequency communication devices. Factors such as material type, porosity, roughness, and oxidation reduce this conductivity, leading to increased insertion loss in the manufactured devices. For characterization, an X-band cavity resonator on a rectangular waveguide was designed, and the quality factor was measured for different implementations using various techniques and materials. Conductivity values of up to 17.70 MS/m were obtained for metalized polymeric materials and up to 6.44 MS/m for metallic alloys.