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Noise Radar Approach for Interrogating SAW Sensors Using Software Defined Radio

Journal Article · · IEEE Sensors Journal

Passive, wireless surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensor systems can be approached from a radar perspective, where the SAW device is thought of as a cooperative target. Here, this paper investigates the use of a commercial-off-the-shelf software defined radio to interrogate wireless SAW sensors with a randomly generated interrogation pulse. The USRP B200mini is utilized as the transceiver platform with custom field-programmable gate array (FPGA) modifications to generate the random interrogation waveform and provide synchronization and buffering to the received signal. Each transmit sample bit in the FPGA is fed by an independent linear-feedback shift register, which generates pseudo-random I and Q samples for the interrogation pulse. An RF daughterboard has also been developed and integrated with the B200mini to increase the transmit power, provide filtering of the RF signals, and switch a signal antenna between the transmit and receive channels. Radio control and matched filter correlator post-processing are accomplished using Python. Design and implementation details for the FPGA modifications, RF daughterboard, and post-processing are discussed. Lastly, the system is demonstrated by wirelessly interrogating SAW temperature sensors at 915 MHz.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE; USDOD; National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA
DOE Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1394282
Journal Information:
IEEE Sensors Journal, Journal Name: IEEE Sensors Journal Journal Issue: 20 Vol. 17; ISSN 1530-437X
Publisher:
IEEE
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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