Design and Analysis of A Microstrip Patch Antenna for Water Content Sensing

A compact, microstip patch antenna is proposed in this paper to sense and identify water content. The proposed antenna sensor is excited through a 3.2-mm-wide microstrip line. The microstrip antenna is designed to resonate at 5.8 GHz. Subsequently, parametric analysis of the proposed antenna sensor is carried out to show the true behaviour of the system. The proposed patch antenna acts as a sensor due to the fact that a sample under test has different dielectric permittivity depending on the water content and, hence, will be having different resonance frequencies. The designed sensor has been experimentally validated with four different levels of water (Empty, 25%, 50% and 75%).