Simple and inexpensive microwave setup for industrial based applications: Quantification of flower honey adulteration as a case study

A simple and inexpensive microwave measurement setup based on measurements of magnitudes of transmission properties ( | S 21 | dB \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}|S₂₁|_dB\end{document} ) is proposed for industrial-based microwave aquametry (moisture or water content) applications. An easy-to-apply calibration procedure based on normalization is implemented to eliminate systematic errors in the measurement system. As a case study, we applied this setup for the quantification of water-adulteration in flower honey. After validating this system by distilled water and pure flower honey measurements, | S 21 | dB \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}|S₂₁|_dB\end{document} measurements of the pure flower honey with various adulteration percentages ( delta \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}δ\end{document} ) up to 9% are conducted to examine the performance of the measurement setup for quantification of water adulteration. A multi-dimensional fitting procedure is implemented to predict delta \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}δ\end{document} using the proposed inexpensive microwave measurement setup. It is shown that it is possible to quantify an adulteration level with an accuracy better than -/+ 1 \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}∓ 1\end{document} % by the proposed measurement setup and the applied multi-dimensional fitting procedure.