Séminaire : Gilles Lubineau

Enabling smart composites through integrable wireless supersensitive sensors: work in progress.

 

Distributed, and even better, embedded sensors are a deeply needed technology for monitoring of large-scale composite structures. Composite structures such as pipelines, tanks, aircraft, ships, and ground vehicles confront some challenges with embedding strain sensing systems incorporating strain gauges or optical fibers that can introduce delamination, cracking and structural failure of the host in addition to the need for dedicated and expensive equipment. We present the evolution of the research in our lab, that led to our latest RF sensing technology with high sensing sensitivity.

This work started with the quest for supersensitive piezoresistive sensors, in which the unique response of cracked structures is leveraged. We illustrate, in the field of stretchable electronics, how the sensors properties can be controlled by tailoring the crack networks. While interesting, super piezoresistive sensors are however not practical, as difficult to integrate in wireless systems,
and with poor reproducibility. 

However, this initial work paved the way for a new generation of sensors based on piezo capacitance. These leverage the unique properties of capacitive sensors equipped with super-piezoresistive electrodes. This hybrid resistive/capacitive technology was integrated into flexible and thin sensors, realizing LC resonators, for which the capacitance is the sensing unit. The tailored piezoresistive effect leads to a strain-dependent dissipation of the electrical wave, resulting in a tremendous increase in the capacitive gauge factor. This unconventional change in capacitance allows a large shifting in resonance frequency of the flexible circuit, producing a sensitive wireless strain sensor with a Gauge factor of 50 for less than 1% strain. Eliminating wires, power source, and electronic chip from the sensor body allow the sensor to be integrated easily inside the composites materials while maintaining the materials' mechanical performance. Active versions have also been designed using classical active chip-based interrogation when embedding the sensors is not needed. 

The experimental results show the ability of our wireless strain sensor to detect small strain signals through the composites structure with high accuracy. Current and future work is about integration of these sensing nodes without composite structures in a non-intrusive manne so we achieve a wireless sensor network (WSN) for monitoring large composites structures.

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