A cylindrical cavity sensor for liquid water content measurement

In this paper, a novel sensor based on microwave resonant method is designed and applied to on-line water content measurement. A cylindrical cavity with both ends open is used as the resonant cavity of the sensor. The water content is obtained by measuring the resonance frequency of the cylindrical cavity. The use of cylindrical cavity offers the advantage of excellent resonant characteristics and, therefore, higher accuracy. Moreover, the cavity size of the sensor can be reduced by the modified measurement method in our paper, making the sensor more economy, and easy to be embedded in the pipes. Simulations and experiments had been conducted for the mixture of water and alcohol. The experimental results are consistent with the simulation results, which indicate the sensitivity of the sensor can reach less than 1%.