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

A simple and inexpensive microwave measurement setup based on measurements of magnitudes of transmission properties ( \(|S_{21}|_{\text {dB}}\) $|S_{21}{|}_{\text{dB}}$ ) 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, \(|S_{21}|_{\text {dB}}\) $|S_{21}{|}_{\text{dB}}$ measurements of the pure flower honey with various adulteration percentages ( \(\delta\) $\delta$ ) 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 \(\delta\) $\delta$ using the proposed inexpensive microwave measurement setup. It is shown that it is possible to quantify an adulteration level with an accuracy better than \({\mp } 1\) $\mp 1$ % by the proposed measurement setup and the applied multi-dimensional fitting procedure.