Thermal and microwave dielectric properties of Cu/polyethylene oxide composite powder prepared by mechanical blending method

•The mechanical blending method is used for synthesis of Cu/PEO composite powders.•0–30 wt% Cu/PEO composite samples are prepared for comparative studies.•XRD confirms the semi crystalline nature of the PEO is independent of Cu content.•Thermal stability increases on increasing of the copper content as observed in TGA.•The complex permittivity of the composites increases with increasing Cu content.

The copper/polyethylene oxide (Cu/PEO) powder composites are synthesized by varying the Cu concentration (by wt%) using mechanical blending method. The synthesized samples are characterized using various sophisticated tools viz. the X-ray diffraction (XRD), the Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), the Thermo Gravimetric Analysis (TGA) and the vector network analyzer (VNA) for the analysis of crystallinity, morphology, thermal stability and the microwave dielectric properties, respectively. The thermo gravimetric analysis result shows that the thermal stability of PEO matrix composite with Cu filler increases on increasing of the copper content. The effective dielectric properties of the resultant composites are measured in the X-band of microwave frequency using cavity perturbation technique. Two different rectangular cavities with a special arrangement of the sample holder are fabricated for testing of the dielectric properties of powdered composites. The variation in Cu-content has brought the significant change in the microwave dielectric properties of Cu/PEO composite e.g. the real and the imaginary parts of complex permittivity are found to be increasing from 2.1 to 6.1, and from 0.07 to 0.15, respectively with increasing the Cu content from 0 to 30 wt%.

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