Exploration of adulteration in common raw spices using antenna-based sensor

The ability of food products to store and dissipate electromagnetic energy is determined by the material's dielectric properties. In relation to this phenomenon, a non-destructive technique is presented for food evaluation based on the shift in resonant frequency and reflection coefficient magnitude value of the proposed slot-loaded microstrip line-fed antenna-based sensor caused by the change in dielectric properties of the food material. In this work, a miniaturized antenna sensor of 10 x 10 mm(2) size comprised of a dielectric substrate FR-4 with permittivity (epsilon(r)) = 4.4 having ground plane at the bottom and a radiating element at the top is designed to operate at 13.3 GHz. Three samples of spices, i.e. red chilli powder, black pepper powder, and turmeric powder, are considered for quality monitoring whose relationship in terms of reflection coefficient, resonant frequency, and dielectric permittivity at 13.17, 12.61, and 13.09 GHz respectively is analyzed. Further, second-order polynomial model is derived to predict dielectric permittivity of the material under test with high accuracy. The experimental procedure of this proposed sensor is based upon the interaction of the sample food materials with the electromagnetic field owing to shift in resonant frequency as a function of dielectric permittivity of the samples. The proposed antenna sensor has a Q-factor of 409, showing significantly high sensitivity of 280 MHz with 98% accuracy and standard deviation less than the difference between unadulterated and adulterated values, giving resolution high enough to distinguish adulteration with an acceptable statistical accuracy.