SAW-RFID enabled temperature sensor

Abstract Wireless sensors based on surface acoustic wave (SAW) technology has its own advantages over its counterparts. In this paper, a novel SAW radio frequency identification (RFID) enabled temperature sensor is proposed for industrial applications, in which short measurement range but high accuracy is usually required. The encoding scheme for the sensor using pulse positions combined with phase information is adopted, and then the relationship between the length of a time slot and the decoding errors is deduced to ensure the sensor can be accurately identified, even though ambient temperature fluctuates. In order to solve the phase ambiguity problem involved in temperature measurements more efficiently and reduce the cost of obtaining the unwrapping temperature characteristic curves in the calibration process, an analytical procedure for calculating the variation of phase delay differences with respect to temperature has been proposed. A self-developed burst transceiver supporting online data analysis is also presented. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed SAW-RFID enabled temperature sensing scheme, and the prototype sensor within a temperature-controlled oven 2 m away from the center of the transceiver antenna in a horizontal orientation achieves an accuracy of ±0.3 °C in the temperature range 0–40 °C.