A palladium decorated signal walled carbon nanotube enabled chipless sensor for detecting methane at room temperature based on UWB-RFID system

Abstract

In order to detect methane at room temperature, a chipless methane sensor in ultra-wideband radio frequency identification (UWB-RFID) is designed in the paper. The proposed sensor is a type of thin film equipped by an antenna and a nano-technique enabled sensor head. The antenna is a planar patch with arc typed edge loaded by lumped circuit for impedance matching; the sensor head is an electrode with interdigitated fingers (IDE) loaded by the palladium decorated single walled carbon nanotubes (Pd-SWCNTs). The performance of the proposed sensor is validated by the analytical and numerical analyses in terms of a predefined scenario where the concentration of methane is increased from 0ppm to 100ppm at room temperature. Results show that, if the sensor is geometrized in the mechanism of amplitude modulation of band-gap, the identifiable sensitivity can achieve -9.32dB; on the contrary, if it is geometrized in the mechanism of frequency modulation of band-gap, the identifiable sensitivity can achieve a little bit high by -11.30dB.