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Electronic Circuits and Interfacing Techniques for Advanced Sensors and Sensor...
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Electronic Circuits and Interfacing Techniques for Advanced Sensors and Sensor Tags

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Industrial Electronics".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 September 2021) | Viewed by 3216

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Marco Baù

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Information Engineering (DII), University of Brescia, Via Branze 38, 25123 Brescia, Italy
Interests: interface electronic circuits for sensors; contactless interrogation techniques for resonant and capacitive sensors; MEMS sensors; energy harvesting for autonomous sensors and microsystems; acoustic-wave sensors; electro-mechanical modeling and FEM simulations; low-noise circuits for sensors and detectors
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Gianluca Barile

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Industrial and Information Engineering and Economics (DIIIE), University of L’Aquila, Via Gronchi 18, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy
Interests: discrete and integrated electronic interfaces for sensors; autonomous wireless sensor networks; low-voltage low-power integrated circuits; current-mode readout techniques; electronics for industrial applications
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The field of sensors has evolved continuously in the last years in order to face the new challenges raised by the advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 scenarios.

Sensors and sensor nodes, besides their typical features, such as suitable sensitivity, resolution, and accuracy, are required to have advanced characteristics such as ultra-low-power consumption, energetic autonomy, and the possibility to be interrogated without contact. Such advanced features have been tackled under different aspects.

In particular, ultra-low-power interface electronic circuits and conditioning techniques have been favored by advances in the fabrication process of integrated circuits joined with new circuit configurations and readout approaches, such as the current-mode and charge-mode ones. Energy-autonomous sensor nodes have gained great attention because of the intensive investigations in energy-harvesting techniques. Solutions for the supply of energy from an external interrogation unit have been also considered, such as RFID-based sensor nodes, exploiting either inductive coupling or back-scattered electromagnetic waves between the sensor unit and the interrogation unit. In addition, contactless techniques based on inductive coupling with a sensor unit composed of LC resonant sensors or electromechanical resonators have drawn much attention, enabling the possibility towards the development of completely passive, and eventually disposable, tags.

In this context, we invite researchers and scientists to submit contributions on of the all scientific and technical aspects of advanced sensors and electronic interfaces dealing with the aforementioned scopes. Both review articles, about the state-of-the-art, and original research articles are welcome.

The topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Advanced techniques and board-level/integrated interface circuits for sensors
  • Contactless/telemetric interrogation techniques for passive LC sensors or electromechanical/MEMS resonators
  • RFID-based sensor nodes
  • RF back-scattering sensors
  • Autonomous sensors and battery-less sensor nodes
  • Passive sensor tags
  • Zero-power sensing

Dr. Marco Baù
Dr. Gianluca Barile
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Sensor interfaces
  • Readout circuits
  • Passive resonant/LC sensors
  • RFID sensor nodes
  • Autonomous sensors
  • Energy harvesting for sensors
  • Contactless/telemetric interrogation

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 6749 KiB  
Article
A Versatile Analog Electronic Interface for Piezoelectric Sensors Used for Impacts Detection and Positioning in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) Systems
by Lorenzo Capineri and Andrea Bulletti
Electronics 2021, 10(9), 1047; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10091047 - 29 Apr 2021
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2273
Abstract
Continuous monitoring of mechanical impacts is one of the goals of modern SHM systems using a sensor network installed on a structure. For the evaluation of the impact position, there are generally applied triangulation techniques based on the estimation of the differential time [...] Read more.
Continuous monitoring of mechanical impacts is one of the goals of modern SHM systems using a sensor network installed on a structure. For the evaluation of the impact position, there are generally applied triangulation techniques based on the estimation of the differential time of arrival (DToA). The signals generated by impacts are multimodal, dispersive Lamb waves propagating in the plate-like structure. Symmetrical S0 and antisymmetrical A0 Lamb waves are both generated by impact events with different velocities and energies. The discrimination of these two modes is an advantage for impact positioning and characterization. The faster S0 is less influenced by multiple path signal overlapping and is also less dispersive, but its amplitude is generally 40–80 dB lower than the amplitude of the A0 mode. The latter has an amplitude related to the impact energy, while S0 amplitude is related to the impact velocity and has higher frequency spectral content. For these reasons, the analog front-end (AFE) design is crucial to preserve the information of the impact event, and at the same time, the overall signal chain must be optimized. Large dynamic range ADCs with high resolution (at least 12-bit) are generally required for processing these signals to retrieve the DToA information found in the full signal spectrum, typically from 20 kHz to 500 kHz. A solution explored in this work is the design of a versatile analog front-end capable of matching the different types of piezoelectric sensors used for impact monitoring (piezoceramic, piezocomposite or piezopolymer) in a sensor node. The analog front-end interface has a programmable attenuator and three selectable configurations with different gain and bandwidth to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio and distortion of the selected Lamb wave mode. This interface is realized as a module compatible with the I/O of a 16 channels real-time electronic system for SHM previously developed by the authors. High-frequency components up to 270 kHz and lower-frequency components of the received signals are separated by different channels and generate high signal-to-noise ratio signals that can be easily treated by digital signal processing using a single central unit board with ADC and FPGA. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electronic Circuits and Interfacing Techniques for Advanced Sensors and Sensor Tags)
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