Fully Passive-Printed Wireless Wear Sensor

• Published in: IEEE internet of things journal Vol. 8; no. 8; pp. 7036 - 7045
• Main Authors: Serdah, Mohammed, Bailey, Callum, Schmidt, Wayde R., Bansal, Rajeev, Dardona, Sameh
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 15.04.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Abrasion; Abrasives; antennas; Brakes; Circuits; coatings; Electrical measurement; Error analysis; Glass ceramics; Integrated circuit interconnections; Interconnections; Monitoring; radio frequency; Radio frequency identification; Real-time systems; Resistors; screen printing; Sensors; Wear; Wireless communication; Wireless sensor networks
• ISSN: 2327-4662; 2327-4662
• DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2020.3037904

Wear of abradable materials presents a significant challenge across many industries, where the efficiency, efficacy, and safety of important systems rely on the detection and monitoring of component wear. Three design variations demonstrate real-time monitoring of wear by a novel, additively manufactured, embeddable, and fully passive wireless wear sensor. The three sensor designs incorporate closely spaced, narrow interconnects connected to a parallel resistor circuit, with a passive RFID chip for complete remote operation. The first design includes ten closely spaced horizontal interconnects and tracks wear events orthogonal to the interconnects for a resolution of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">200~{\mu }\text{m} </tex-math></inline-formula>. The second design divides horizontal interconnects into two interdigitated sets of five lines each to achieve a resolution of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">125~{\mu }\text{m} </tex-math></inline-formula>. The third design features ten interconnects printed vertically and connected to a sloped drain line to achieve a resolution of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">50~{\mu }\text{m} </tex-math></inline-formula>. We fabricated all three designs with a single-layer print on machinable glass-ceramics and commercial surface-mount resistors. Lab testing showed that the three sensor designs had an overall experimental resolution of 215.3, 127.8, and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">57.34~{\mu }\text{m} </tex-math></inline-formula>, respectively. We attribute error to a combination of manufacturing challenges related to the printing of orthogonal and acute angled narrow interconnects, RFID sampling rates, and errors from testing. The maximum error in measured voltage steps for each of the three designs is 10%, 6.67%, and 6.78%. This study is limited in sample size due to testing constraints and is presented as proof of concept. Future work should assess the robustness of these designs and processes.