Design and Fabrication of Nondestructive Capacitive Sensors for the Moisture Measurement in Chickpeas and Mustard Seeds

Geetika Aswani, Om Prakash Maurya, Rahat Mahboob, Anwar Ulla Khan () and Tarikul Islam ()
Additional contact information
Geetika Aswani: Electrical Engineering Department, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi 110025, India
Om Prakash Maurya: Electrical Engineering Department, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi 110025, India
Rahat Mahboob: Electrical Engineering Department, Tezpur Central University, Tezpur 784028, Assam, India
Anwar Ulla Khan: Department of Electrical Engineering Technology, College of Applied Industrial Technology, Jazan University, Jazan 45142, Saudi Arabia
Tarikul Islam: Electrical Engineering Department, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi 110025, India

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 5, 1-18

Abstract: Moisture in food grains, including chickpea and mustard seeds, plays a crucial role in their storage and processing, thus ensuring food quality. It helps in the improvement of preservation techniques. Moisture in these materials is an age-old problem; hence, it is important to monitor it in real time. The conventional gravimetric method is manual and time-consuming; some online electrical techniques are available in which grains are considered as a dielectric material, but they are relatively complex and costly. This present work describes a nondestructive concentric fringing field (CFF) capacitive sensor to detect moisture (4–33% by absolute weight) of chickpea grain and (12–30% by absolute weight) mustard seed. First, the proposed CFF sensor was modeled, and then three distinct concentric sensors were designed, simulated, fabricated, and experimentally validated to determine moisture in chickpea grains and mustard seeds. The capacitance values of all the sensors approximately linearly varied with the changes in the moisture of the grains. The average sensitivity of the most sensitive sensors was close to 20 fF/% wt for chickpeas and 31 fF/% wt for mustard seeds. The proposed sensor is sensitive, nondestructive, easy to use, inexpensive, and fast.

Keywords: capacitive sensors; concentric fringing field; chickpea grains; mustard seeds; moisture measurement; non-contact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/5/1847/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/5/1847/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:16:y:2024:i:5:p:1847-:d:1344707

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().