Large-Area Conductor-Loaded PDMS Dielectric Composites for High-Sensitivity Wireless and Chipless Electromagnetic Temperature Sensors

Abstract

Wireless electromagnetic sensing is a passive, non-destructive technique for measuring physical and chemical changes through permittivity or conductivity changes. However, the readout is limited by the sensitivity of the materials, often requiring complex sampling, particularly in the GHz range. We report capacitive dielectric temperature sensors based on polydimethylsiloxne (PDMS) loaded with 10 vol% of inexpensive, commercially available conductive fillers including copper powder (Cu), graphite powder (GP) and milled carbon fibre powder (CF). The sensors are tested in the range of 20°C to 110°C, with enhanced sensitivity from 20 to 60°C, and relative response of up to 85.5% at 200 MHz for CF loaded capacitors. Additionally, we demonstrate that operating frequency influences the relative sensing response by as much as 15.0% in loaded composite capacitors. Finally, we demonstrate the suitability of PDMS-CF capacitors as a sensing element in wirelessly coupled chipless resonant coils tuned to 6.78 MHz with a readout response, in the resonant frequency of the sensor. The wireless readout of the PDMS-CF chipless system exhibited an average sensitivity of 0.38 %°C-1 which is a 40x improvement over a pristine PDMS-based capacitive sensor and outperforms state of the art frequency-domain radio frequency (RF) temperature sensors including carbon-based composites at higher loadings. Exploiting the high sensitivity, we interrogate the sensor wirelessly using a low-cost and portable open-source NanoVNA demonstrating a relative response in the resonant frequency of the reader coil of 48.5%, with the response in good agreement with the instrumentation-grade vector network analyzers (VNAs), demonstrating that the sensors could be integrated into an inexpensive and portable measurement setup that does not rely on specialty equipment or highly trained operators.