Elaboration of Simple Gel Phantoms for 5G/mm Wave Communications

Tissue-mimicking phantoms are widely used in literature for testing devices. Current studies are focused on achieving wideband phantoms for technologies covering wide bandwidths. Many of these phantoms have been reported for frequencies that are currently in use for mobile communications services, but not for upcoming 5G systems. This work aims at developing new phantoms with a working frequency band within 24.25 and 67 GHz for these new communication systems. Taking into account that the penetration depth of the body tissues is really low, the skin was the target tissue. Two issues were addressed, the meeting of the dielectric target values with new compounds and the gelling of these mixtures to get firm materials. For this purpose, different simple alcohols were analyzed as candidates for mimicking the skin. Furthermore, it is intended to model these data with different mixing rules in order to estimate the final relative permittivity of the solutions. Additionally, the solutions were gelled with k-carrageenan, which has promising mechanical properties without altering the dielectric ones.