Contamination detection in fresh natural rubber latex by a dry rubber content measurement system using microwave reflectometer

This paper proposes a classifier for contamination detection in fresh latex. It relates to a dry rubber content (DRC) measurement system implemented with a 1 GHz microwave reflectometer (MWR), which behaves anomalously when fresh latex field samples are contaminated with cassava flour or CaCO3 by 10% by mass or more. The relative permittivity (εr) of non-contaminated and contaminated samples were investigated and an algorithm for detecting contaminants is proposed. The performance of this algorithm was tested experimentally and practically significant contamination levels were diagnosed with high accuracy.