Battery-free, Wirelessly Powered and Controlled Concrete Resistivity Sensing Node

This paper presents a generic Sensing Node, part of a Cyber-Physical System, dedicated to the Structural Health Monitoring of reinforced concretes. The Sensing Node is: battery-free; low-power; fully wireless; wirelessly, remotely and omnidirectionally powered and controlled by the Communicating Node(s) over several meters (at least 11 meters in indoor). It can be buried in the reinforced concrete and measure relevant parameters, such as temperature, relative humidity, mechanical deformation, and electrical resistivity to estimate the corrosion rate. By using a unique antenna, the proposed solution meets the requirements of the Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer paradigm. The proposed system is easily scalable to other applications, especially in harsh environments.