Highly Sensitive Differential Microwave Sensor Using Enhanced Spiral Resonators for Precision Permittivity Measurement

This article presents a highly sensitive microwave sensor for dielectric sensing. One of the main disadvantages of microwave resonant-based sensors is cross sensitivity originated by time-dependent uncontrolled environmental factors, such as temperature, that affect the material under test (MUT) behavior, leading to undesirable frequency shifts and, hence, lower accuracy. However, this work eliminates the unwanted errors using the differential measurement technique by comparing two transmission resonance frequencies during a unit test setup to measure the permittivity of MUT over time. The proposed structure comprises a spiral resonator with an extended horizontal microstrip line (EH-ML) coupled to a microstrip transmission line (MTL). Creating EH-ML within the structure comprises two primary contributions: enhanced sensitivity resulting from stronger fringing fields generated by increasing the effective area and improved resolution due to higher resonance frequencies caused by a lower total capacitive coupling effect. The proposed sensor is fabricated and tested using MUTs with a permittivity of less than 80 to verify the performance. In this regard, a frequency detection resolution (FDR) of 44 MHz and a sensitivity of 0.85% are achieved at a maximum permittivity of 78.3. The results of theoretical analysis, simulation, and measurement are in relatively good agreement. Consequently, the proposed highly sensitive microwave sensor offers significant advantages, such as low complexity in design and fabrication. It also offers high resolution and precision in a wide range of permittivity, which can be an attractive candidate for dielectric sensing in health, chemical, and agriculture applications.