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

Ugur C Hasar; Hafize Hasar; Hamdullah Ozturk; Huseyin Korkmaz; Yunus Kaya; Mehmet Akif Ozkaya; Amir Ebrahimi; Joaquim J Barroso; Vahid Nayyeri; Omar M Ramahi

doi:10.1038/s41598-024-59346-3

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

Sci Rep. 2024 Apr 17;14(1):8847. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-59346-3.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Gaziantep University, 27310, Gaziantep, Turkey. uchasar@gantep.edu.tr.
² Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Republic of Türkiye, Gaziantep Directorate of Provincial Agriculture and Forestry, 27090, Gaziantep, Turkey.
³ Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Gaziantep University, 27310, Gaziantep, Turkey.
⁴ Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Gaziantep Islam Science and Technology University, 27010, Gaziantep, Turkey.
⁵ Department of Electronics and Automation, Bayburt University, 69000, Bayburt, Turkey.
⁶ The School of Engineering, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
⁷ Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica, São José dos Campos, SP, 12228-900, Brazil.
⁸ School of Advanced Technologies, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, 1684613114, Iran. nayyeri@iust.ac.ir.
⁹ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada.

Abstract

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

Keywords: Adulteration; Cheaper; Honey; Instrument; Microwave; Simple calibration; Water.