A Comparative Study of Oven Drying Method and Microstrip Moisture Sensor for Determination of Moisture Content of Soil and Analysis of Bulking of Sand Phenomenon

This paper introduces a comparative study between two methods, standard oven drying method and microstrip moisture sensor (MMS), for calculating moisture content (MC) of alluvial soil. This paper aims to reduce the time of calculating moisture content of soil to few hours from MMS in comparison with 24 h from standard oven drying method, which is presently a standard test in construction industry for determination of moisture content of soil. Therefore, for this purpose, a microstrip moisture sensor is designed and fabricated using computer simulation technology (CST) software. While, measurement of MC in soil performed by sensor using vector network analyser (VNA). Hence, the result obtained from MMS for soil is compared with standard oven drying method. In this way, sensor is found to be accurate with error of 1.15% only, which is negligible. Therefore, sensor can be adopted for measurement of moisture content of soil. In this way, efficiency of construction industry can be increased. Also this paper’s another objective is to analyse the phenomenon of bulking of sand from designed sensor. It is found that sensor is able to detect bulking of sand accurately. Though, for study three sample of alluvial soil and sand is taken from three different construction sites.