Submersible High Sensitivity Microwave Sensor for Edible Oil Detection and Quality Analysis

A high sensitivity complementary multiple split ring resonator (CMSRR) based submersible microwave sensor for edible oil detection and quality analysis is proposed. The main part of the sensor is the CMSRR loaded flared microstrip patch, and the proposed single-port structure is quite attractive for liquid detection. The proposed sensor was fabricated and measured to operate at 8.49 GHz with very high Q factor, which agrees very well with the simulated results obtained by High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS). A strong electric field can be observed along the sides of CMSRR at resonance, creating a sensing region sensitive to changes in the nearby dielectric material. By simply immersing the sensor into some familiar oil samples and heated peanut oil, the device's resonance and peak attenuation change greatly. The measured results have proven the improved sensitivity of the proposed sensor on the liquid samples compared with the methods described in the literature. The complex permittivity of the oil samples can be estimated by establishing an approximate model in HFSS. Two empirical formulas were built and fitted to estimate the complex permittivity of unknown several oil samples and heated peanut oil samples. The estimated dielectric constants agree well with the existing data. The estimated error is within 1.4% and the measured sensitivity is up to 7.25%. The proposed sensor has advantages, being compact, inexpensive, reliable, easy to operate, and highly sensitive, and has potential applications in oil detection and quality analysis.