Characterisation of the Electromagnetic Properties of Flower Leaves for 2.45 Ghz ISM Band Biodegradable Electronics Applications

The digital transformation of healthcare, education, industry, and agriculture has generated new opportunities but also led to an increased use of digital devices that will lead to an increase in electronic waste (e-waste) at the end of the life cycle of these devices. In this paper, we report the electromagnetic properties of plant leaves from ten of the most used flowers that can be used to produce environmentally friendly microstrip antennas or fully biodegradable sensors for application in smart agriculture. The analysis of the results for the electromagnetic properties of the leaves of selected plants showed that the real part of the relative permittivity varied widely from 22.962 to 67.43387 for the leaves of garden plants and from 27.82699 to 55.80639 for the potted plants. The variation of the loss tangent of leaves is quite similar in potted (from 0.22718 to 0.35972) and garden (from 0.22812 to 0.33277) flowers.