Abstract
The paper presents a new methodology to assess the ethanol content in water solutions. The system exploits a microwave resonator embedded in a polycarbonate sampling cell. The resonator frequency depends on the ethanol percentage and is monitored in real-time through a non-contacting probe. The method shows a precision better than 1% in ethanol percentage in the range of 1–30%, but can be applied also outside this range. Moreover, the methodology can be further improved or adapted for the analysis of other types of aqueous solutions or liquid mixtures upon evaluation of their dielectric properties.
Highlights
The development of chipless radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology offers several advantages to the field of radio-frequency (RF) identification
This paper proposes a novel low-cost method of analysis of liquids based on a chipless RFID sensor structure
We demonstrated that the methodology proposed is able to detect the ethanol content with precision around or better than 1% but this parameter can be improved in different ways, and this will be the focus of our future work
Summary
The development of chipless radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology offers several advantages to the field of radio-frequency (RF) identification. The most common methods of analysis of ethanol in water-based solutions include High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIR) [17,18]. These studies are based on non-resonant technologies and report neither a quantitative estimation of ethanol content nor the intrinsic accuracy and range of applicability of the method, which is of fundamental importance for the practical implementation or the market exploitation.
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