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Journal of Engineering Research

Journal of Engineering Research

Abstract

Because water has the highest real permittivity value, close to 80, compared to dry soils' real permittivity, which ranges from 3 to 15, measuring a soil's permittivity is strongly reliant on its moisture content. Furthermore, increased relative permittivity leads to a larger reflectivity coefficient. According to these perspectives, adding water to dry soil generates notable changes in wet soil permittivity and modifies the reflectance and characteristics of incident electromagnetic waves (EMWs) at the soil-air interface. Thus, the soil water content (SWC) may be reliably determined by recording variations in the properties of incident EMWs compared to a reference dry soil case. This inspired us to develop a millimeter wave radar system to measure the SWC. In this paper, the design and hardware implementation of a 2.4 GHz millimeter wave radar system is introduced for SWC measurement. The SWC measurement principle of the proposed system is based on measuring the reflection coefficient of the soil-air interface. The received analog signal is amplified before it is converted into a digital signal that is sent by the Arduino microcontroller to the computer buffer via the serial communication port to be analyzed using the designed MATLAB codes

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