CSIWC RF sensor for micro‐fluidic non‐contact quality assessment of milk

Abstract

In this work, the design of the SIW-based RF sensor is presented to assess the targeted quality of milk. In the present scenario, mainly two parameters, namely, purity and fat level are considered to assess the milk quality. Customized in-lab preparation of milk adulterant using low-grade vegetable oil, detergent, water, and glucose is carried out to analyze the practical milk adulteration scenario. Moreover, commonly consumed pure cow and buffalo milk samples are also collected to record the corresponding reference RF properties. A systematic approach is followed to develop the complete database related to actual milk samples with known fat percentages. Then accordingly, the proposed RF sensing mechanism is employed to identify the possible deviation in milk quality. The proposed work mainly employs the SIW-based non-contact RF sensing mechanism where the perturbation formulation is used to perform a qualitative assessment. Mathematical processing of the relative shift in the obtained S-parameters, corresponding to the variation in dielectric property of test samples at specified RF frequency, is carried out. Even though the work's main aim is a qualitative assessment of milk quality, dielectric property estimation of considered test samples is also performed to visualize their quantitative RF attributes. A compact, low-cost, non-contact, real-time, and micro-fluidic CSIWC RF sensor with high-quality factor and improved accuracy and sensitivity is designed.