Design, Fabrication and Testing of Metamaterial Inspired Microwave Device for Sensor Applications

This paper presents a novel design; CSRR loaded planar RF sensor. The 3D- modelling of metamaterial and proposed RF sensor's architecture and fine-tuning was done using CST-MWS. The complementary ring-cavity resonator inspired microwave sensor device was fabricated using photolithography method which is realized on FR-4 dielectric substrate of relative permittivity <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">${{{{\varepsilon }}}_{\mathrm{r}}} = 4.4$</tex> with thickness h=1.6mm. A closed match between the calculated transfer coefficient at 3.195 GHz and simulated frequency of 3.195 GHz was seen. The proposed metamaterial based RF sensor device has a quite high sensitivity; therefore, such microwave sensor device can be suitable for sensing applications and more specifically it can be used in material characterization. The sensing applicability of the metamaterial inspired microwave device was tested using dielectric substrate of different relative permittivity. The sensor takes the advantage of the microwave S-band frequency range, enabling incorporation into an affordable microwave signal detection architectures for examination.