A Composite Right/Left-Handed Transmission Line Sensor for Permittivity Measurements

The paper presents a sensor for measuring the dielectric constant of solids and liquids, based on Composite Right/Left-Handed Transmission Line (CRLH-TL) structure. For the proposed sensor, the operating principle and the fabrication technology are described in detail. The sensor utilizes a novel CRLH unit cell approach which separate coaxial line Right-Handed (RH) and substrate based Left-Handed (LH) components. For sensing applications, CRLH structures can exhibit high sensitivity and at the same time have the advantage of scalability in frequency and size and have the ability of conformal adaptation to the sensing task [1]. For proof of concept, a coaxial transmittance type sensor is realized and tested in a dedicated measurement setup with different grains and seeds.