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

Abstract A simple and inexpensive microwave measurement setup based on measurements of magnitudes of transmission properties ( $$|S_{21}|_{\text {dB}}$$ | 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, $$|S_{21}|_{\text {dB}}$$ | S 21 | dB measurements of the pure flower honey with various adulteration percentages ( $$\delta$$ 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 $$\delta$$ 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 $${\mp } 1$$ ∓ 1 % by the proposed measurement setup and the applied multi-dimensional fitting procedure.