Impedance Measurements With Second-Order Harmonic Oscillator for Testing Food Sterility

Stoyan N. Nihtianov, Senior Member, IEEE, Georgi P. Shterev, Nikolay Petrov, and Gerard C. M. Meijer, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract
Simple interface circuit for measuring impedance based on a secondorder harmonic oscillator This circuit is intended for testing the sterility of packed food products, where it must measure the conductivity changes of the packed food in a non destructive way. The measure impedance is modeled as a low-ohmic resistor (presenting the conductivity of the food) in series with a capacitor (the walls of the container) The oscillator is built with fast current-feed-back operational amplifier To measure the resistive component of the impedance, an AC to DC converter is realized with a wide frequency range analog multiplier. The experimental result prove that with this interface circuit an accurate measurement of impedance components can be achieved in a frequency range up to 10 MHz. The range of resistive component is from a few ohms up to 200 ohms.

Introduction