Determination of Salinity and Sugar Concentration by Means of a Circular-Ring Monopole Textile Antenna-Based Sensor

Abstract

This paper presents a monopole antenna-based sensor for measuring different amounts and concentrations of salt and sugar in water. The proposed antenna sensor consists of a textile monopole antenna with circular-ring and partial ground plane. It is implemented by means of embroidery on a felt textile substrate and it resonates at 2.4 GHz. The textile substrate can absorb liquids through the sensing area incorporated within the monopole antenna structure. Therefore, the substrate dielectric properties are changed according to the liquid properties of the absorbed solution. The proposed antenna sensor uses microwave signals to track different amount and concentrations of salt and sugar in terms of the magnitude of the return loss and resonance frequency shift. The measurements are recorded and compared before and after applying different solutions. The rinsing reliability of the proposed antenna sensor has been also studied. The proposed antenna sensor demonstrates a high sensitivity of 800 MHz/mL with a good correlation with the linear fit ( 2 R = 0.9737) and 550 MHz/mL with linear response ( 2 R = 0.9135) for 5% salt and sugar concentration solutions, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this article demonstrates for the first time the capability of a fully-textile antenna sensor to detect different amounts and concentrations of salt and sugar using microwave signals.

Embroidered Textile Frequency-Splitting Sensor Based on Stepped-Impedance Resonators

“…In [38], a flexible printed microwave sensor is demonstrated to be able to detect DI water with a resolution and sensitivity (in MHz/l) comparable to the one of the presented approach, but such sensor is not based on embroidered techniques. In [39], a circular-ring monopole textile antenna based-sensor for the determination of salinity and sugar concentration through absorption is presented. The reported sensitivity (in MHz/l) and resolution is of the same order, but worse, as compared to the one of the sensor proposed in this paper.…”

“…The reported sensitivity (in MHz/l) and resolution is of the same order, but worse, as compared to the one of the sensor proposed in this paper. Moreover, in [39], a single-ended measurement technique was considered. By contrast, in this work, a quasi-differential technique has been used, and the sensor exhibits robustness against crosssensitivities caused by environmental factors (as far as they are seen as common-mode stimuli).…”

A symmetric bar chart-shape microwave sensor with high Q-factor for permittivity determination of fluidics

“…One of the important applications of microwave sensors is determining the dielectric constant of various materials [7][8][9][10][11][12]. By determining the dielectric properties of materials, the type of material can be determined, and one of these methods is the use of bandpass [13] and bandstop filters [14,15] and antenna [16][17][18] structures. Sensors can be used to determine the amount of pressure [19], distance [20], or strain [17] and acoustic waves [21].…”

“…Since the sensors can detect the type of material by determining the dielectric constant of the material, therefore different types of substances can be measured, for example, the amount of brine [27], blood glucose [28][29][30], methanol [31,32], milk [33], moisture [34][35][36][37], oil in food [38], amount of salt and sugar in water [16], type of tissue [39], determining the amount of phosphate and nitrate [40], and most importantly determining the type of solid or liquid [11] material are among the tasks carried out by sensors. One of the most important features of sensors in today's industry is that they are non-contact [27,33] and non-invasive [2,15,24,30].…”

Measurement of low‐loss aqueous solutions permittivity with high detection accuracy by a contact and free‐label resonance microwave sensor

“…8 There are two different styles of design for the sensors; the first style is non-resonance such as Severo et al's study, 9 and the second style, due to the higher accuracy and simpler design, is resonance. [10][11][12][13] In the resonance method, filter structures [14][15][16][17][18][19] and antennas structures [20][21][22] can be used to create resonance, and in these methods, all scattering parameters can be used in resonance. [23][24][25] Depending on the design algorithm, these methods are different.…”