Experiment study of using parallel plate sensor for the detection of conductive material

Abstract

Gold is one of the precious metal that has a good demand market in the world. Due to that, many fraud cases happen especially when dealing with the jewelry. Thus, verifying gold content is important and need to be done with the best techniques. This paper introduces an ECT sensor of two parallel plates using square electrodes. This sensor was investigated either it capable to detect the conductive materials; Gold. A complete architecture of a system is designed which include the sensor design, the main controller unit design and graphic user interface (GUI). A two-plate ECT sensor with 2 electrodes each plate will fabricate on the printed circuit board (PCB). This experiment will implement single electrode excitation method. When electrode 1 was injected by the source, electrodes other than electrode 1 are at the virtual earth potential or called as detecting electrode. Independent capacitance measurements were taken from the three electrodes with different excitation frequency. The frequency will vary from 50Hz to 9.5MHz. The experiment result shows that the two parallel plate ECT sensor is able to measure the conductive materials.