Industrial applications of metamaterial based sensors

In the industry, the sensor structures must meet crucial requirements such as sensitivity, accuracy and linear response in advance level. With the help of these sensors, it is quite possible to obtain mass manufacturing, low cost and high quality products. Therefore, metamaterial (MTM) based sensor structures have been developed for different application areas in microwave concept. MTMs have strong electrical and magnetic coupling due to their resonator geometry. The sensing abilities of the MTM based sensor structures have been tested both numerically and experimentally. In numerical phase, the sensor structures have been designed by examining dimension and equivalent circuit parameters, electric field and surface current distributions, impedance matching and resonance frequency. In experimental phase, the sensor structures have been produced and the electrical characteristics of the samples have been measured. The transmission/reflection magnitude and resonance frequency variations have been obtained both numerically and the experimentally. The results have been compared and evaluated. Finally, 7 unique sensor structures and a novel approach with artificial neural network (ANN) have been proposed for various industrial applications. Key Words: MTM, microwave sensors, industrial sensors, microwave resonators, electrical coupling, magnetic coupling, dielectric