SOIL MOISTURE DETECTION USING ELECTRICAL CAPACITANCE TOMOGRAPHY (ECT) SENSOR

This report consists of five chapters which are introduction, literature
review, methodology, results and discussions, and conclusion and
recommendations. The introduction portion explains about the background of
study of the project, problem statement, project objectives and scope of the study.
The objectives of this project are to design an Electrical Capacitance Tomography
(ECT) sensor for soil moisture detection, calibration measurement for lower and
higher permittivity material, and conducting online measurement to measure the
percentage of moisture content in soil. The literature review describes the research
about the project topic such as ECT technique and soil moisture measurement.
ECT is a measurement technique used to obtain the visualization and
measurement of a permittivity distribution in a cross section using multi-electrode
capacitance sensor. The methodology part contains research methodology process
flow, project activities with key milestone table as the attachment, tools required
to run the project, and experimental procedure to conduct the experiment. The
results and discussion contains the fabrication result of the ECT sensor, low
calibration results, online measurement results, and discussion about the results
obtained. The preliminary result shows that there is a positive correlation with
increasing moisture percentage in soil. The conclusion consists of overall
conclusion regarding the report. For future improvement, the experimental
procedure will be improved by conducting a test on different types of soil. A
simple wireless control system to control the irrigation event by detecting and
analyzing the percentage of moisture in soil is recommended.