Design of low-cost humidity sensor based on chipless RFID

Abstract

It is of great significance to design a low-cost chipless radio frequency identification(RFID) sensor for environmental humidity  monitoring. To this end, polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) film is used as a humidity sensitive material, and the overall size of the rectangular substrate is 18 mm × 18 mm ×0.5 mm. Through the humidity sensing principle and simulation analysis, the change of environmental humidity causes the change of the dielectric constant of the humidity sensitive material PVA, which in turn affects the resonant frequency offset of the entire sensor. The simulation results show that the relative humidity working range of the designed humidity sensor is 21.9% ∼ 52.5%, the corresponding sensor resonant frequency range is 2.76 ∼ 2.51GHz, the total offset reaches 250 MHz, and the average sensitivity at the maximum relative humidity is 23.08MHz/% . The designed humidity sensor has the advantages of miniaturization, simple structure and low cost, and can be used for humidity monitoring in various target environments. Keywords.low cost; chipless RFID humidity sensor; polyvinyl alcohol; humidity monitoring; humidity sensitive material.