Dispersed passive RF-sensing for 3D structural health monitoring

Abstract

We propose a sensing system comprising a large network of tiny, battery-less, Radio Frequency (RF)-powered sensors that use backscatter communication. The sensors use an entirely passive technique to 'sense' the parameters of the wireless channel between themselves. Since the material properties influence RF channels, this fine-grain sensing can uncover multiple material properties both at a large scale and fine spatial resolution. In this paper, we study the feasibility of the proposed passive technique for monitoring parameters of material in which the sensors are embedded. We performed a set of experiments where the sensor-to-sensor wireless channel parameters are well-defined using physics-based modeling, and we compared the theoretical and experimentally obtained values. For some material parameters of interest, like humidity or strain, the relationship with the observed wireless channel parameters have to be modeled relying on data-driven approaches. The initial experiments show an observable difference in the sensor-to-sensor channel phase with variation in the applied weights.