Wireless Battery-Free Harmonic Communication System for Pressure Sensing

In this paper, an efficient passive wireless harmonic communication system is proposed for the real-time monitoring of the pressurized pipelines. A pressure sensor is fabricated using the additive manufacturing technique and a harmonic radio frequency (RF) tag is designed to operate at the fundamental frequency (fo) of 2 GHz that shifts the phase of the back reflected RF signal according to the applied pressure ranging from 0 to 20 psi. A power efficient phase modulation with virtually no losses is achieved using a hybrid coupler-based phase shifter that efficiently reflect back the incoming signal using an end coupled reactive impedance element/sensor. The phase delay introduced by the reactive element gets doubled with the second harmonic communication, which increases the sensitivity by a factor of two. The concept of harmonic backscattering is exploited to reduce the effects of multi-path interference and self jamming, as well as improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).