A Novel Multiresonant Chipless RFID Tag for Directional Strain Measurement on Metal Surface

Abstract

In this article, a radio frequency identification (RFID) sensor tag for real-time health monitoring of the magnitude and direction of metal surface strain is presented. The chipless RFID sensor tag is composed of metal foil and F4B substrate, which is low-cost and works stably in harsh environments for a long time. Through highly sensitive strain monitoring, the risk can be predicted in the early stage of defect generation. The proposed tag includes a C-type resonator array, <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> -type transmission line, and tag antennas. The C-type resonator has different sensitivities in the electrical length direction and width direction. Then, based on this characteristic, the resonator array creates a plurality of characteristic signatures containing strain information by optimizing the geometric parameters of the resonators. The strain information is transmitted to the tag antenna through the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> -type transmission line to complete the wireless communication between the tag and the reader. Finally, the performance of the strain monitoring system is verified by an experimental study. The experiment shows that the average sensitivity of the resonators is −4.94 and 1.14 kHz/ <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \varepsilon $ </tex-math></inline-formula> in the electric length and width directions, respectively. When the strain is more than 150 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \varepsilon $ </tex-math></inline-formula> , the relative error of magnitude is less than 12.7% and the absolute error of direction is less than 13.3°. Therefore, the proposed chipless RFID tag can monitor the amplitude and direction of strain with higher sensitivity and a simpler structure, for the key structures, such as the high-speed running gear.