A Design Method for a Microwave-Based Moisture Sensing System for Granular Materials in Arbitrarily Shaped Containers

Journal article

Authors/Editors

KOSIN CHAMNONGTHAI

Strategic Research Themes

Innovative Materials, Manufacturing and Construction (Strategic Research Themes)

Publication Details

Author list: Jiarasuwan S., Chamnongthai K., Kittiamornkul N.

Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Publication year: 2021

Journal: IEEE Sensors Journal (1530-437X)

Volume number: 21

Issue number: 17

Start page: 19436

End page: 19452

Number of pages: 17

ISSN: 1530-437X

eISSN: 1558-1748

URL: https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85111014695&doi=10.1109%2fJSEN.2021.3087414&partnerID=40&md5=2b11a4d7a5be0b4434087f2e1c7bb48c

Languages: English-Great Britain (EN-GB)

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Abstract

To estimate the moisture in an entire arbitrarily shaped workpiece, an automatic system should continuously sense moisture at all points of the workpiece. This paper proposes a design method for a microwave-based moisture sensing system for granular materials in arbitrarily shaped containers based on scanning in a moisture sensing box. The size of the moisture sensing box is first determined as the maximum size of any granular material containers based on the initial user requirements. The moisture sensing system physically consists of a pair of antennas for the microwave transmission and reception and a pair of distance sensors to scan throughout the maximum scanning range of the moisture sensing box to find the attenuation and workpiece thickness at all points of the workpiece. Then, these sensed microwave attenuations and measured workpiece thicknesses are used to calculate the moisture at all points of the workpiece. Finally, the average moisture of all points is taken as the estimated moisture of the entire workpiece. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, experiments were performed with granular materials in containers of various shapes. The estimation results show that the proposed method of continuous moisture scanning of a workpiece can improve accuracy by approximately 7.77% compared to the antenna array approach. © 2001-2012 IEEE.

Keywords

arbitrarily shaped container, granular materials, Microwave-based moisture sensing, moisture sensing box, moisture sensing system