LAUSR

A novel chipless RFID based structural health monitoring sensor is proposed in this paper. By using the time domain reflectometry (TDR) based technique, this device enables a wireless, low-cost and pervasive sensing system for detecting the presence of crack in a structure. The proposed sensor is designed on the Taconic TLX-0 substrate and it integrates a super wide band (SWB) antenna with a long transmission line. The SWB antenna covers a bandwidth of 2–20 GHz which offers extremely short time domain pulses. This eventually enables a high-resolution crack sensing scheme that results in higher accuracy and greater precision. A thorough analysis on the designed sensors with a straight and a meandered transmission line is carried out and a comparative study between the SWB and UWB technologies is performed to imply the superiority of the proposed technique. The experimental results from a fabricated prototype of the sensor validate the theoretical analysis.