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Microwave and radio frequency sensors are an emerging technology for chemical and physical sensing. They can sense in real-time and non-contact fashion, which makes them suitable for different environments. They are very small, can be conformal to surfaces, and are amenable to integration with electronics and microfluidics. Our group is a pioneer in establishing high resolution microwave sensing for detecting and monitoring small changes in liquid, gas and solid phases.
Sensing and monitoring various materials (solid, liquid, and gas) have a high market demand in industries such as oil and gas, automotive manufacturing, biomedical and environmental monitoring, where all require application of advanced sensors to not only understand the process and environmental impact, but also enhance efficiency. The Internet of Things (IoT) is also another factor that drives sensor development.
Microwave chemical sensors stand out in the highly competitive sensor market, with their capacity for real-time monitoring, non-contact measurements, and integral form factors. Our group at the University of Alberta is pioneering high-resolution microwave chemical sensing based on complex permittivity measurements.
Sample under test and circuit loss is compensated through an active feedback loop, enhancing the quality factor by orders of magnitude, enabling high resolution sensing with the aim of pushing the limits of detection (LOD) to very small quntities. Our group has initiated the design and development of novel active resonators where the loss of planar resonators is compensated adjustably and the quality factors are boosted up by orders of magnitude; hence lossy-, multi-layered-, and less-variant (e.g. gaseous) mediums can be experimented.
Initial advantages of the proposed methodology is enabling many biomedical-, oil/sand-, and environmental-applications based on tracking minute concentrations. Furthermore, wireless communication, now compatible with the active resonator, empowers the sensor to be integrated into IoT design. Due to the variety of resonator-based active circuit design, evolution of the sensor is expanded into amplifier-, oscillator-, mixer-, etc. structures to enhance its functionality and reliability.
RFID technology has proven its potential use in many disciplines such as retail, medical, pharmaceutical, automotive, etc., due to its simplicity and security. As microwave sensor engineers, we are exploiting chipless RFID systems for use as a detection and sensing device simultaneously. Using the spatial signature of RFID based sensors as the main criteria to fetch the change in materials' electrical properties (e.g. dielectric properties), and hence infer its physical phase (liquid, gas, solid), temperature, deformation, etc., RFID is advantageous in terms of low cost and scalability for application in all industrial themes. Currently, we are working on using RFID as an invasive monitoring technique for oil & gas pipelines.
