Design and fabrication of passive wireless sensor array system using composite coding resonant SAW transducer

Abstract

This paper presents a novel composite SAW (surface acoustic wave) passive wireless sensor system involving a resonator and a delay line. While the interrogational signal is a sinusoidal burst, the response is a delayed and damped oscillation. The frequency and the delay time of response are related to the measurand and the coding of the sensor element, respectively. The composite sensor consists of a SAW resonator and a delay line. It combines the advantages of these two devices and can be used as elements of multiple sensors for longer distance passive wireless measurements. As the wireless sensing response is weak and transient, in order to get the response with the maximum signal-to-noise ratio, the interrogational frequency is designed to be adjustable according to the result of frequency estimation. As a result, an optimal sensing result is achieved. In the transceiver set-up, the software DDS (direct digital synthesis) source with a rather high resolution is implemented to track the passive wireless sensor. An isolated switch is set in transmitter to depress the correlation leakage noise after switching off the wireless RF (radio frequency) interrogation signal. In this paper, the characteristics of the response, the working procedure of the signal processing, sensor temperature test results and the system error analyses are elaborated. A prototype instrument is built. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the instrumentation and the advantages of the composite sensor system.