A Low-cost and Accurate Microwave Sensor System for Permittivity
Characterization
Abstract
A novel low-cost microwave sensor system is proposed for accurate
sensing of the real relative permittivity of materials under test (MUT).
The proposed solution eliminates the need for using advanced measurement
devices such as the vector network analyzer (VNA) for sensor
characterization. The proposed sensor system is built on a
software-defined radio platform. A suitable two-stage frequency
estimation approach was developed for estimating the frequency shift of
the resonator sensor associated with the real relative permittivity of
the MUT. First, the neighborhood of the resonance frequency is obtained
utilizing a low-resolution coarse search, followed by a fine search
method to accurately estimate the resonance frequency. For the fine
search, we modified the AM frequency estimation algorithm and the Golden
Section search algorithm to suite the proposed sensor system. The
performance of the proposed sensor system is validated through
simulations and experiments. To demonstrate the feasibility of the
concept, experiments were conducted by implementing the solution on a
Universal Software Radio Peripheral transceiver using a resonator sensor
for detecting the binary mixture of water and methanol. The results show
that the proposed sensor system achieves measurement accuracy comparable
to advanced equipment such as the VNA. Thus, the proposed sensor system
could be a low-cost alternative for sensor characterization purposes
with accuracy comparable to standard equipment.