Arshad Hassan

Microstrip Patch Sensor for Salinity Determination

In this paper, a compact microstrip feed inset patch sensor is proposed for measuring the salinities in seawater. The working principle of the proposed sensor depends on the fact that different salinities in liquid have different relative permittivities and cause different resonance frequencies. The proposed sensor can obtain better sensitivity to salinity changes than common sensors using conductivity change, since the relative permittivity change to salinity is 2.5 times more sensitive than the conductivity change. The patch and ground plane of the proposed sensor are fabricated by conductive copper spray coating on the masks made by 3D printer. The fabricated patch and the ground plane are bonded to a commercial silicon substrate and then attached to 5 mm-high chamber made by 3D printer so that it contains only 1 mL seawater. For easy fabrication and testing, the maximum resonance frequency was selected under 3 GHz and to cover salinities in real seawater, it was assumed that the salinity changes from 20 to 35 ppt. The sensor was designed by the finite element method-based ANSYS high-frequency structure simulator (HFSS), and it can detect the salinity with 0.01 ppt resolution. The designed sensor has a resonance frequency separation of 37.9 kHz and reflection coefficients under −20 dB at the resonant frequencies. The fabricated sensor showed better performance with average frequency separation of 48 kHz and maximum reflection coefficient of −35 dB. By comparing with the existing sensors, the proposed compact and low-cost sensor showed a better detection capability. Therefore, the proposed patch sensor can be utilized in radio frequency (RF) tunable sensors for salinity determination.

Disposable all-printed electronic biosensor for instantaneous detection and classification of pathogens

A novel disposable all-printed electronic biosensor is proposed for a fast detection and classification of bacteria. This biosensor is applied to classify three types of popular pathogens: Salmonella typhimurium, and the Escherichia coli strains JM109 and DH5-α. The proposed sensor consists of inter-digital silver electrodes fabricated through an inkjet material printer and silver nanowires uniformly decorated on the electrodes through the electrohydrodynamic technique on a polyamide based polyethylene terephthalate substrate. The best sensitivity of the proposed sensor is achieved at 200 µm teeth spaces of the inter-digital electrodes along the density of the silver nanowires at 30 × 103/mm2. The biosensor operates on ±2.5 V and gives the impedance value against each bacteria type in 8 min after sample injection. The sample data are measured through an impedance analyzer and analyzed through pattern recognition methods such as linear discriminate analysis, maximum likelihood, and back propagation artificial neural network to classify each type of bacteria. A perfect classification and cross-validation is achieved by using the unique fingerprints extracted from the proposed biosensor through all the applied classifiers. The overall experimental results demonstrate that the proposed disposable all-printed biosensor is applicable for the rapid detection and classification of pathogens.

Memristor-capacitor passive filters to tune both cut-off frequency and bandwidth

In various optical sensor applications, programmable analog filters are desirable to reduce the hardware requirement. Memristor is two state programmable nonvolatile resistor, which has a small size and low power consumption. Using these resistance switching characteristics of a memristor, we propose a novel memristor-capacitor (MC) based printed low pass and high pass filters for analog circuits to achieve tunable cut-off frequencies and bandwidth. The cut-off frequencies of filters are controlled through a memristor state switching (HRS/LRS), whereas the capacitor has a fixed value. The proposed MC filters utilize graphene/poly 4-vinlyphenol (G/PVP) for dielectric layer of capacitors and Graphene Quatum Dots (GQDs)/PVP for an active layer of memristor, and these layers are fabricated on ITO coated flexible PET substrate through electrohydrodynamic (EHD) technique. Both MC filters are designed as parameters of two state memristance and a capacitance. From comparison between designed and fabricated filters, we show that they are matched quite well.

Flexible dual-band antenna for communication and radar applications

In this paper, a dual-band antenna to operate over free communication standards (900 MHz and 2.4 GHz) is proposed, which is designed in Ansoft high frequency structure simulator (HFSS). The designed antenna is fabricated through commercialized Dimatix material inkjet printer by using silver nano-particle conductive ink on 50 μm PET substrate. The measured reflection coefficient is less than -10 dB at both operating frequency bands, which is shows good agreement with simulation results. The simulated gain of the proposed antenna is 16.74 dBi and 16.24 dBi at 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz, respectively. The -10 dB fractional bandwidth of the antenna is 23.33% and 11.66% at 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz bands, respectively. The radiation efficiency of the antenna is 99.63% at the lower band. These results shows that the proposed antenna can be considered as a potential candidate for flexible and transparent printed electronic devices operating over dual frequency band. Similarly, the antenna is suitable for both simple communication and ultra-low power radar applications simultaneously (by using FDMA) due to its bandwidth characteristics.