Recently, structural health monitoring (SHM) using radio frequency identification (RFID) tag antenna-based sensing (TABS) has received increasing attention because of its wireless, passive, and low-cost characteristics. However, a great challenge in the SHM using RFID TABS is multiple influences in the measurement. This paper presents an ultrahigh frequency RFID sensor system for corrosion detection and characterization. In this paper, a 3-D antenna sensor is designed to work on the surface of a protective coated steel sample. Sweep-frequency measurements are applied for analog identifier with principal component analysis (PCA) to overcome the multiple influences from reader-tag orientation, distance, and environment. Feature extraction and selection though PCA can get robust and sensitive defect information by projecting the test data into an orthogonal feature space. The test results demonstrate that the proposed method can be applied to detect and characterize early-stage corrosion in metals.

A radio frequency identification (RFID) based system is developed in this paper as a novel passive wireless sensor to detect corrosion for structural health monitoring (SHM) of metallic surface through simulation, design, fabrication and experiment. Firstly, a 2D label‐type antenna in a new configuration – circular three arm (CTA) element – is designed as an ultrahigh frequency (UHF) RFID sensor tag working on surface of steel samples. To improve gain and power transmission coefficient, a parasitic element has been added into the centre of CTA. The CTA antenna attached with the parasitic element – so called (CTAP) sensor – has a quality factor notably higher than similar metal mountable UHF RFID antennas that has been resulted to revelation of resonance frequency in measured forward interrogation power. A demonstration and validation system are introduced then to detect corrosion based on the shift of revealed resonance frequency in the forward interrogation power to activate the CTAP tag when placed on surface of corroded and non‐corroded steel samples. Results show that the presented system could communicate with sensor tag to detect corrosion up to 2 m of read monitoring range at the UHF RFID standard bandwidth with a sensitivity around of 13 MHz.

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