NANOSONIC INC. — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: C54-19d

Description

The problem this DOE program addresses is the wiring required by sensors in large manufacturing systems. Running wiring requires time and interior space needed by cable trays and complicates the rearrangement of production systems. This problem is being addressed by developing small, passive radio frequency identification sensors for the wireless instrumentation of industrial manufacturing systems. Radio frequency identification systems offer advantages for industrial systems requiring many sensors, because they are designed to identify many individual tags. Passive radio frequency identification systems use tags that consist of an antenna and an integrated circuit mounted on the tag. The central radio frequency identification electronic control system, or the ‘reader,’ communicates a unique identifier to one of the tags. That tag recognizes its identifier and its integrated harvests energy from the reader signal to power up and communicate its identifier back to the reader. In this way, the reader can recognize that specific tags are present over a short distance range, limited by the amount of power the tag integrated circuits can harvest. During Phase I, NanoSonic will redesign conventional passive radio frequency identification sensor systems to allow the combination battery-free operation, large analog sensor distance communication range, a large number of individual sensors, and small sensor element footprints. The radio frequency identification reader would be redesigned to generate higher transmitted radio frequency power than currently available systems, and the integrated circuits in the sensor elements redesigned to incorporate energy harvesting circuits to detect and store received RF energy. The long radio frequency identification tag address transmitted back to the reader would consist of the local tag identifier and digitized local sensor data. To reduce sensor element size, high impedance magnetodielectric antenna substrate materials would be designed by ferroelectric materials researchers at Penn State. Sensor tag and antenna size is estimated at less than 1cm2. The system would be designed to use standard analog resistance or capacitance-based sensing elements. Commercial Applications – Potential products resulting from this program are the sensors, systems and developed antenna materials. Potential industrial customers would be companies interested in monitoring many sensors during product manufacturing, or companies that need to monitor critical infrastructure such as pipelines, power lines and substations, power generation facilities, and transportation systems.