A circular cavity resonance method is improved to measure the frequency dependence of complex permittivity of a dielectric plate by using multimode TE0m1 with integer m. The measurement principle is based on a rigorous analysis by the Ritz-Galerkin method. A new circular cavity with lowered height is designed from a mode chart of a cavity to decrease the number of unwanted modes near the TE0m1 modes. A copper cavity having 20 GHz for the TE011 mode was constructed based on this design. For glass cloth PTFE, RT/duroid 6010 and FR-4 dielectric plates, the frequency dependences are measured from resonant frequencies for the TE0m1 (m = 1, 2, 3 ...) modes. These measured results agree well with ones measured by using the conventional four different size cavities with TE011 mode. It is verified that the designed cavity structure is useful to measure the frequency dependence of low loss dielectric plates.

A novel resonator structure for the cut-off circular waveguide method is proposed to suppress the unwanted TE modes in the axial direction and TM modes in the radial direction. In this method, a dielectric plate sample is placed between two copper circular cylinders and clamped by two clips. The cylinder regions constitute the TE0m mode cut-off waveguides. The measurement principle is based on a rigorous analysis by the Ritz-Galerkin method. Many resonance modes observed in the measurement can be identified effectively by mode charts. In order to verify the validity of the novel structure for this method, the temperature dependences for three low-loss organic material plates were measured in the frequency range 40 to 50 GHz. It is found that modified polyolefin plates have comparable electric characteristics and low price, compared with PTFE plates. Moreover, it is verified that the novel resonator structure is effective in improvement of accuracy and stability in measurement. The measurement precisions are estimated within 1 percent for εr and within 15 percent for tan δ.

A grooved circular cavity is designed for the millimeter wave measurements of dielectric substrates. The grooves are introduced to separate the degenerate TE01p and TM11p modes in circular cavities. A rigorous mode-matching method is used to investigate the influence of grooves on both the TE01p and TM11p modes. The dimensions of the grooves are determined from the numerical results. Comparative experiments of circular cavities with and without grooves validate the design method.