Scientific Reports, cilt.14, sa.1, 2024 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
A simple and inexpensive microwave measurement setup based on measurements of magnitudes of transmission properties (|S21|dB) 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, |S21|dB measurements of the pure flower honey with various adulteration percentages (δ) 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 δ 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% by the proposed measurement setup and the applied multi-dimensional fitting procedure.