Exploration of adulteration in some food materials using high‐sensitivity configuration of electric‐LC resonator sensor

Food adulteration is a major contributor toward the poor quality of health, especially in developing countries, and hence, the detection of adulteration in most of the food products remains a major challenge in today's scenario. In the light of this, two configurations of the electric‐LC resonator loaded over coplanar waveguide (CPW) are designed—one with LC axis aligned with CPW axis while other with LC axis perpendicular to CPW axis, and investigated in this work for the higher sensitivity. Both the prototypes are designed and fabricated on FR4 substrate and the later configuration turned out to be more sensitive than the former which is then ultimately deployed for detecting adulteration in some of the food materials, namely, chick pea flour and wheat flour. The chick pea flour is adulterated with split pea flour while the wheat flour is adulterated with rice flour, which are generally the common adulterants. The measurement results reveal that the chosen configuration is successfully able to detect adulteration even in low amount exhibiting an almost linear relationship between the percentage adulteration and the resonance frequency shift which is the sensing parameter.