Wireless and Batteryless Surface Acoustic Wave Sensors for High Temperature Environments

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development and application of wireless, batteryless surface acoustic wave sensors designed for high-temperature environments, emphasizing material selection and recent advancements in high-temperature sensing.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of SAW sensor principles, recent high-temperature applications, and material choices enabling operation in hostile environments.

Findings

SAW sensors enable wireless, batteryless high-temperature measurements

Material selection is critical for high-temperature SAW sensor performance

Recent developments have expanded SAW sensor applications in extreme environments

Abstract

Surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices are widely used as filter, resonator or delay line in electronic systems in a wide range of applications: mobile communication, TVs, radar, stable resonator for clock generation, etc. The resonance frequency and the delay line of SAW devices are depending on the properties of materials forming the device and could be very sensitive to the physical parameters of the environment. Since SAW devices are more and more used as sensor for a large variety of area: gas, pressure, force, temperature, strain, radiation, etc. The sensors based SAW present the advantage to be passive (batteryless) and/or wireless. These interesting properties combined with a small size, a low cost radio request system and a small antennas when operating at high frequency, offer new and exiting perspectives for wireless measurement processes and IDTAG applications. When the materials constituting the devices are properly selected, it becomes possible to use those sensors without embedded electronic in hostile environments (as high temperature, nuclear site, ...) where no solutions are currently used. General principle of the SAW sensor in wired and wireless configurations will be developed and a review of recent works concerning the field of high temperature applications will be presented with specific attention given to the choice of materials constituting the SAW device.