The Use of Microwave and K* Algorithm in Determination of Alcohol Concentration in Liquids

Alcohol is widely used in various fields today. Alcohol overdose and its improper use can cause many health problems. Drinking liquids with high alcohol concentration, especially methanol, causes poisoning, and the use of colognes with high alcohol concentration causes various skin conditions and respiratory diseases. Therefore, for public health it is important to determine the type and concentration of alcohol in beverages and liquid products. In this paper, K* algorithm is used to detect and classify liquids containing high concentration of alcohol by measuring the scattering parameter of the liquids in the microwave frequency band. For this purpose, scatter parameter values of aqueous solutions of ethanol, methanol, 1-propanol and 2-propanol at different concentrations have been used as training sets. Commercial liquids with known ethanol concentrations and liquids with other known alcohol concentrations have been tested to prove the accuracy of the proposed approach. As the results show the proposed approach can classify liquids containing alcohol and their alcohol concentrations successfully and with high accuracy.