Real-time determination of wood moisture content using dielectric properties: A case study on Falcataria falcata

The direct determination of the moisture content of wood is based on the oven drying technique, which is a time consuming and expensive approach. In this study, capacitance was used as the core factor to determine the moisture content of Falcataria falcata (‘mara’ in Sinhala) using a parallel plate capacitor. Wood samples were allowed to absorb water forcefully, surface water was removed, and their weights were measured at different time intervals while they were kept in a microwave oven at 373 K. Corresponding moisture content was calculated by mass differences due to evaporation. The capacitances of wood samples were measured for different moisture levels at room temperature using an Inductance (L), Capacitance (C), and Resistance (R) meter, which applied a constant and optimum frequency of 10 kHz. The cubic regression model was chosen as the best fit model, since it showed 98.46% and 98.43% for adjusted R² and R² values, respectively. The average error of the regression model was found as 1.6915×10^–14. The proposed parallel plate capacitor method demonstrated 97.7% accuracy with respect to the standard method. This indicates that the proposed method is highly reliable and can serve as an effective alternative to the standard technique for measuring the moisture content of wood.