Characterization of Recycled Plastics for Automotive Radar Applications at 77 GHz

Opponents: Tini Thomas, Grish Kanna Malar Vijayakumar.
Supervisors: Stella Bevilacqua, Sara Tell, Iman Vakili, Volvo Car Corporation
Examiner: Jan Stake, MC2

Abstract: The Radar Group of Volvo Cars Corporation (VCC) has identified that using recycled plastics in the manufacturing of bumpers in cars can affect automotive radar performance to a significant extent. To support this theory, the recycled plastic samples must be analyzed and tested for their dielectric properties, specifically the permittivity and loss tangent, to make sure they don't absorb too much of the radar signal energy and lead to misdetections or false calculation of distances with adjacent vehicles or stationary objects. The task is to develop a measurement method that helps to analyze the recycled plastic samples in the E-band and use that S-parameter data to calculate the permittivity and loss tangent values. To validate the accuracy of this method, a reference sample with known permittivity and loss tangent value is tested, and that data is used in the extraction code to verify if we get the same values as configured initially.