Abstract
The idea of battery-less flow sensors and their implementation in wireless measurement systems is presented in this research article. The authors take advantage of their latest achievements in the Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic (LTCC) technology, RadioFrequency Identification (RFID) technique, and increasing availability of low power electronics in order to get rid of the need to use electrochemical cells in a power supply unit of the elaborated device. To reach this assumption, special care has to be put on the energy balance in such an autonomous sensor node. First of all, the new concept of an electromagnetic LTCC turbine transducer with a signal conditioner which only draws a current of around 15 µA, is proposed for measuring a flow rate of fluids. Next, the autonomy of the device is showed; measured data are gathered in a microcontroller memory and sent to a control unit via an RFID interface which enables both information exchange and power transfer. The energy harvested from the electromagnetic field is used to conduct a data transmission, but also its excess can be accumulated, so the proposed sensor operates as a semi-passive transponder. The total autonomy of the device is achieved by implementing a second harvester that continually gathers energy from the environmental electromagnetic field of common active radio systems (e.g., Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), wireless network Wi-Fi).
Highlights
When there is a necessity to apply measuring equipment in a harsh environment, in hardly accessible cases or when installation of a wire system is unprofitable, autonomous sensor nodes with a wireless interface can be used [1,2]
The battery-free semi-passive RadioFrequency Identification (RFID) transponder-sensor proposed in the paper is designed to operate autonomously outside the interrogation zone, it should still be considered an element of the automatic identification system
The obtained results are much better than what is reached in the typical Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic (LTCC) process flow where single tapes are machined using a laser system and stacked together; the stacking misalignment is in the range of around 100 μm
Summary
When there is a necessity to apply measuring equipment in a harsh environment, in hardly accessible cases or when installation of a wire system is unprofitable, autonomous sensor nodes with a wireless interface can be used [1,2]. The full autonomous sensor node that can measure any physical quantity can be designed only after applying a battery source and using chips with a semi-passive mode Such a model is implemented for example in the Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP) proposed by Intel Research Seattle laboratory [16] or Self-Powered Augmented. RFID Tag for Autonomous Computing and Ubiquitous Sensing (SPARTACUS) [17], and other research systems [18,19] These untypical solutions operate as semi-passive transponder-sensors with an internal analog-to-digital converter and can measure different physical quantities (humidity [19,20], temperature [19,21,22], light intensity [21,22], pressure [23], acceleration [24], gas [19,25], etc.). In order to cope with these drawbacks the authors propose the special construction of the RFID semi-passive transponder-sensor with a two-antenna system (Section 4)
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