Capacitance and Inductance of a Parallel Plate Transmission Line

Here we present the derivation of the expressions for the capacitance and inductance per unit length of a parallel
plate transmission line of which a small section of length
 is illustrated below. In what follows it is assumed that
the dielectric constant of the insulating material between the plates is .

For the purpose of determining the capacitance per unit length, we can model each incremental length of the line as
a parallel plate capacitor of plate area
 ∙ . We use Gauss' law to relate the electric field  between the capacitor
plates to the surface charge density  on each of the plates:




∴ 
 ⁄ .

If the capacitor plate separation is
, then the voltage between the plates is




∙

.


Substituting the above expression for the voltage in the definition of capacitance we find

 


.
 

Finally, since  (the total charge on each capacitor plate) is related to the surface charge density  by


 ∙  ∙
 ,

we have that

 ∙  ∙
  ∙  ∙





and dividing by
 we arrive at an expression for the capacitance per unit length:

∙

.

Next we derive an expression for the inductance per unit length. The integral form of Ampere's law (with the
displacement current omitted) relates the current  flowing in one of the transmission line plates to the tangential
magnetic field  found in the dielectric between the plates:


  ∙

 ∙  .
Substituting the above expression for  in the expression that defines inductance as the ratio of magnetic flux to
current we obtain

1   ∙
∙

∙


  ∙

  ∙


 ,
     ∙  

where we used 
 . Finally, dividing by
 we arrive at an expression for the inductance per unit length:




.