Surface acoustic wave devices for sensor applications

Surface acoustic wave （SAW） devices have been widely used in different fields and will continue to be of great importance in the foreseeable future. These devices are compact, cost efficient, easy to fabricate, and have a high performance, among other advantages. SAW devices can work as filters, signal processing units, sensors and actuators. They can even work without batteries and operate under harsh environments. In this review, the operating principles of SAW sensors, including temperature sensors, pressure sensors, humidity sensors and biosensors, will be discussed. Several examples and related issues will be presented. Technological trends and future developments will also be discussed.

Call for papers Journal of Control Theory and Applications Special issue on Wireless sensor networks:from theory to practices and applications

Wireless Sensor Network （WSN） is characterized by the dense deployment of sensor nodes that continuously observe physical phenomenon. The main advantages of WSN include its low cost, rapid deployment, self-organization, and fault tolerance. WSN has received tremendous interests of various research communities,

The Teaching Reform of“Sensor Principle and Application”Course Based on OBE Education Concept

Outcome based Education(OBE)emphasizes“student-centered,output-oriented”continuous improvement to meet the needs of students to acquire knowledge and develop abilities.The result orientation of the existing“Sensor principle and application”course teaching reform emphasizes the understanding and application of sensor principle,mastering the principle of language rules,object-oriented programming method and thinking mode.The teaching reform of this course is based on the concept of OBE,focusing on the combination of sensor principles and students’majors,and guiding students to apply object-oriented development tools reasonably and efficiently in related professional engineering.Comprehensive projects should be introduced into practical teaching to appropriately increase the workload and difficulty of practical teaching and cultivate students’awareness and ability of teamwork.Solve the“pain points”and“blocking points”existing in the curriculum,so as to combine the curriculum with talent training.The results of practical application show that the students’engineering application ability is improved and they can complete the comprehensive practical project well.

Accurate Location Estimation of Smart Dusts Using Machine Learning

Traditional wireless sensor networks(WSNs)are not suitable for rough terrains that are difficult or impossible to access by humans.Smart dust is a technology that works with the combination of many tiny sensors which is highly useful for obtaining remote sensing information from rough terrains.The tiny sensors are sprinkled in large numbers on rough terrains using airborne distribution through drones or aircraftwithout manually setting their locations.Although it is clear that a number of remote sensing applications can benefit from this technology,but the small size of smart dust fundamentally restricts the integration of advanced hardware on tiny sensors.This raises many challenges including how to estimate the location of events sensed by the smart dusts.Existing solutions on estimating the location of events sensed by the smart dusts are not suitable for monitoring rough terrains as these solutions depend on relay sensors and laser patterns which have their own limitations in terms of power constraint and uneven surfaces.The study proposes a novel machine learning based localization algorithm for estimating the location of events.The approach utilizes timestamps(time of arrival)of sensed events received at base stations by assembling them into a multidimensional vector and input to a machine learning classifier for estimating the location.Due to the unavailability of real smart dusts,we built a simulator for analysing the accuracy of the proposed approach formonitoring forest fire.The experiments on the simulator show reasonable accuracy of the approach.

A Novel Fiber Bragg Grating with Triangular Spectrum and Its Application in Strain Sensor

A novel fiber Bragg grating with triangular spectrum is presented. A strain sensor based on this fiber grating is proposed. Experiments showed that the sensor has advantages of high sensitivity, wider measuring range and immunity to fluctuation of the light source power.