Combined Temperature and Humidity Chipless RFID Sensor

A temperature and humidity chipless RFID sensor is presented in this paper. The tag ID as well as the two physical parameters are extracted using a traditional chipless RFID tag and interrogation procedure. No specific material, i.e. particularly sensitive to the quantities to be measured, is used for ease of implementation. The method is based on a model which describes precisely the evolution of the scatterer’s resonance frequency as a function of temperature and humidity. The materials permittivity (impacted by these two quantities) and dilatation (impacted only by the temperature) are taken into consideration to estimate these two physical quantities independently and simultaneously using only the measurement of the resonance frequencies of two scatterers. Measurements in a controlled environment and in a real environment are achieved showing the potential of this approach for the sensor application. The sensing limitation as well as the possibility of this approach to characterize the temperature and humidity dependencies of unknown materials are also presented.