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Quality control is of great importance in food industry, both for the evaluation of product characteristics and to avoid the occurrence of foreign bodies contamination in packaged items. With respect to the inspections against possible contaminants inside the product, different technologies are currently adopted along production chain lines. However, the number of accidents involving low density objects remains very large. To overcome this limitation, the use of electromagnetic technologies has been recently proposed. In this work, the synergic use of terahertz and microwaves technologies is proposed, so to provide high resolution images and in-depth inspections of different scenarios, including low density materials. A focus study on sugar samples is considered, reporting both its broadband characterization at microwaves and preliminary terahertz imaging to evaluate the integrity of the packaging. Ongoing research is devoted to the development and validation of a microwave device for monitoring food products along the production line.

Civil infrastructure systems such as bridges, buildings, dams, pipelines, airports, and heritage structures are complex engineered systems that play a fundamental role for the economic and industrial prosperity of society [1]. In order to build structures that are safe for the community, standardized design methodologies have been developed [1]. However, these structures are often subjected to various external loads and problematic environmental conditions that are difficult to consider during the design phase, resulting in structural deterioration [2].

In this work, a prototype of microwave imaging system for through-the-wall monitoring is presented. The system can operate remotely, as well as by using antennas directly in contact with the wall. For the remote modality, ad-hoc wide-band antennas have been designed and integrated into an efficient measurement system, able to acquire the scattered-field data. Such measurements are processed by a novel hybrid inversion procedure able to create an image of the inspected scenario. For the proximity modality, a Bessel beam launcher is specifically designed, realized and tested to provide a focused near-field with enhanced penetration capabilities. Preliminary results are provided for assessing the capabilities of the system.

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. Starting from these considerations, in this paper, the results related to moisture content measurements of three construction materials (namely, plaster mortar, portland cement and pozzolan cement) are reported. The advantage of the proposed system is that it can allow to monitor in real time the water content of construction materials inline, so as to assess their quality throughout the production process.