Wideband Measurement of Dielectric Properties of Wheat Flour

Use of electromagnetic (EM) fields in the food industry for food inspection as well as sterilization and drying is increasing. To develop such applications, the knowledge of the dielectric properties of food is fundamental. In the literature, there is scarcity of data on dielectric properties of powdered foods, with reported values that are usually at specific frequencies only. This article reports the development of an experimental framework to characterize the dielectric properties of powdered food over a wide range of frequencies. The used methodologies include the open-ended coaxial probe technique and waveguide systems: the first being intrinsically a broadband technique but strongly dependent on the type of material being tested, and the latter being a medium- to narrowband technique allowing a better control of the tested material. The proposed framework is then used to measure the dielectric properties of several types of flour between 500 MHz and 20 GHz. The measured properties are then characterized in terms of density and interpolated with a Cole-Cole dispersive model. From the measured results, the suitability of the proposed setup was demonstrated. Additionally, it was verified that the permittivity of flour does not depend on the brand and can be expressed as a function of the density of the material, following a mixture formula already proposed in the literature. Moreover, the proposed Cole-Cole fit is able to represent the frequency behavior of the real part of permittivity of flour with differences within 3% from the measured data.