Miscellaneous dielectric constants

Updated May 24, 2007

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We've been working on making this our master list of dielectric constants on the Microwaves101 web site, so we have started adding ceramics and semiconductor substrates to the original list. In addition to "normal" microwave engineering materials, the dielectric constant of common materials is important in biomedical engineering, food science, material processing, and homeland security. You can expect that this list will grow over time, and you can also expect that if you search the web you might get slightly different numbers than you see here, although we strive to give you the best data we can find. Send us corrections or additions by clicking here. We'll keep adding anything that crosses our bow. If you are a substrate material vendor, consider sponsoring this page on soft substrate materials and we'll stuff it with your stuff!

Note that dielectric properties can be a function of temperature or frequency, and of course the exact composition of the material. The data below applies to room temperature unless otherwise noted.

We've started to footnote the data so you can check our references. This is tedious but important, we'd rather be doing something else! Some of the material on this page was found in this government document thanks to Mark! It was from the DARPA NETEX Program which was exploring propagation through wall materials. We have taken some other data from an old MIC Technology databook, and perhaps some more from Peter Rizzi's textbook on Microwave Engineering Passive Circuits (look in our book section!) Other data may have come from an article in Applied Microwave and Wireless, by Fenske and Misra

Hypertextbook.com has a good web page that has a ton of dielectric constants on it!

Material	Dielectric Constant (_R)	Loss Tangent (tan)
Air	1.00	depends on weather
Bacon (smoked)	2.50	0.05
Balsa wood	1.30
Beef (frozen)	4.4	0.12
Beef (raw)	52.4	0.3302
Benzo-cyclo butene, a.k.a. cyclotene (BCB) ^[5]	2.65	0.002
Beryllium oxide ^[1]	6.7	.003
Blood*	58	0.27
Bricks	3.7-4.5
Butter (salted)	4.6	0.1304
Butter (unsalted)	2.9	0.1552
Borosilicate glass	4.3	0.0047
Cloth office partition	1.2
Concrete (dry)	4.5	0.0111
Concrete blocks	2.1-2.3
Corn oil	2.6	0.0077
Cottonseed oil	2.64	0.0682
Door (presumably wood)	2.0
Sandy soil (dry)	2.55	0.0062
Egg white	35.0	0.5
Fat*	5.5	0.21
Gallium arsenide (GaAs)^[2]	12.88	.0004
Glass, ceramic	6.0	0.0050
Glass, soda lime	6.0	0.02
Glass, window	6.5
Indium phosphide	12.4
Lard	2.5	0.0360
Liquid crystal polymer (LCP) ^[3]	2.9	0.002
Lung*	32	0.3
Mica ^[4]	5.4	.0003
Muscle*	49	0.33
Nylon	2.4	0.0083
Olive oil	2.46	0.0610
Paper	3-4	0.0125-0.0333
Parylene C	2.7	0.1
Parylene N	2.7	0.0006
Plywood	2.5
Polyethelene	2.25
Poly-tetra-fluroethelene (PTFE)	2.1	0.00015-0.0003
Quartz (fused, SiO₂) ^[1]	3.8	.0001
Rexolite - 1422 ^[4]	2.52	0.0005
Silicon	11.7
Silicon carbide	10.8	0.003
Silicon dioxide	4.1	0.001
Snow (hard packed)	1.50
Snow (freshly fallen)	1.20
Styrofoam	1.11
Teflon (PTFE)	2.1	0.00015-0.0003
Thermoset polyester	4.0	0.0050
Wallboard (sheetrock)	2.4
Water, distilled ^[4]	77	0.157
Wood, balsa ^[4]	1.22	0.1
Wood (depends on type)	1.2-5 (typically 2 for "structural" wood such as chip board)	0.0040-0.4167

*At 37 degrees Celsius

[1] From an old MIC Technology databook
[2] Raytheon RF Components
[3] Rogers Corporation
[4] Rizzi, Microwave Engineering, Passive Circuits
[5] Dow.com

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