Low Cost Printed, Flexible, and Energy Autonomous VAN-ATTA and Carbon-nanotubes-based mm-wave RFID Gas Sensors for Ultra-long Range Ubiquitous IOT and 5G Implementations

Committee:

Dr. Manos Tentzeris, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. Andrew Peterson, ECE

Dr. Gregory Durgin, ECE

Dr. Herve Aubert, INP Toulouse

Dr. Suresh Sitaraman, ME

Abstract:

The work presented in this thesis presents significant hardware developments, on the path leading towards the ubiquitous presence of intelligence, and the permeation of the physical into the digital. More specifically, the reported work describes the creation of an approach that enables the addition of intelligence unto any surface, for the low-cost, real-time, and ubiquitous sensing of chemical agents. This outcome is the product of reported advances enabling the design and demonstration of fully-printed skin-like devices that can be precisely located and can fully-autonomously sense and transmit, at long range, in real time, part of the make-up of their chemical environments. These results were achieved through the combination of additive-manufacturing tools and technologies, nanomaterials-based sensing, and ultra-low-power mm-wave (24 GHz to 28 GHz) retrodirective communications schemes and signal processing. Notably, the work describes (to our knowledge), the longest-ranging chipless RFIDs and unamplified monostatic backscatter RFIDs—at the time of their publication—and the first ever fully-inkjet-printed organophosphorus nerve agent in the literature.