Battery-less long-range wireless fluidic sensing system using flexible additive manufacturing ambient energy harvester and microfluidics

Abstract

Fluid sensing has been an important but missing part of the massive Internet-of-Things sensor networks due to challenges including excessive manufacturing time/cost, finite wireless interrogation range, limited immunity to ambient clutter, and excessive required power for autonomous microfluidics operability. Here, we proposed an additive manufacturing flexible system as a solution to those challenges while enabling fluid analysis from controlled labs to virtually everywhere. Energy harvesting provides all required power for the actuation of the micro-pump enabling battery-less liquid sample acquisition. Energy sources including ultra-high-frequency radio frequency identification and hand-held devices like two-way talk radio are harvested simultaneously to support energy requirements for periodic monitoring every 6.6 min and on-demand monitoring within 4.63 s. Backscattering topologies are used to significantly extend the reading range while increasing the immunity to interferences and reducing the cost to the reader. A new additive manufacturing process is proposed to reduce fabrication time and cost while enabling massive scalability of flexible microfluidics. The good flexibility makes the system suitable for working toward future wearable applications. Prototypes of a sweat sensing system are demonstrated and successfully interrogated at 3 m with more than 15 dB signal-to-noise ratio using only a 14 dBm transmitter equivalent isotropic radiated power.