Moisture content monitoring of construction materials: from in-line production through on-site applications
In this work, a time domain reflectometry (TDR)-based system for measuring water content of construction materials is presented. The proposed system relies on the fact that the presence of water leads to an increase of the effective dielectric permittivity of materials (being the relative dielectric permittivity of construction materials in the order of 3-7, and that of water approximately 78). Therefore, through TDR measurements of the apparent permittivity of the material, it is possible to obtain calibration curves that allow retrieving the water content.