Sensitivity Comparison of Common Microwave Feeds to be Useful in Angular Displacement Sensors

In this work, the authors analyze the performance of dielectric resonator (DR) based angular displacement sensor with different feeding methods. It is demonstrated that, sensor characteristics like resonant frequency, impedance matching, sensitivity, and dynamic range are highly dependent on the selected feeding technique. The common microwave feeds such as the coaxial probe, slot line, microstrip line, and conformal microstrip line are considered for reflection mode operation. Standard commercial EM simulation tool ANSYS HFSS is used for performing the simulations. Analysis of the simulation results lead to proposing the microstrip line feed for realizing fixed-frequency DR based angular sensor which is experimentally validated.