RF System Development for Sensor and Wireless Communication Applications Inside a Circular Pipe

The design of a wireless RF communication system, for propagation inside a circular metallic pipe is presented. A PCB antenna which is operational at 2.4 GHz is employed for the transceiver. Some lab measurements and simulations are reported, considering a 2 m length of metal pipe which is analyzed as an overmoded metallic waveguide. The reflection coefficients show that the antennas can be operational inside the pipe and the insertion losses were approximately 1 dB between the transceivers. The simulation results are in agreement with the measurements. Also included in the RF system are two software-defined radios, positioned at both ends of the pipe, for data communications. Also some extra attenuation was included in the system as well as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) to test the system limits in terms of power and the bit error rate (BER), respectively.