Simple and inexpensive microwave setup for industrial based applications: Quantification of flower honey adulteration as a case study.

Abstract

A simple and inexpensive microwave measurement setup based on measurements of magnitudes of transmission properties ( ) 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, measurements of the pure flower honey with various adulteration percentages ( ) 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 using the proposed inexpensive microwave measurement setup. It is shown that it is possible to quantify an adulteration level with an accuracy better than % by the proposed measurement setup and the applied multi-dimensional fitting procedure.