Evaluation of electrical resistance of electrodes with conductive ink for agriculture applications using computer technology

Abstract

The article presents the ongoing research, which aims to select suitable electrodes and mixtures of conductive inks, which will be used as a converter between the pressure and electrical quantities in the design of planar pressure transducers. In the described research, we continue our previous work and the work of other authors who have previously dealt with the properties of conductive inks and electrodes. Due to the only partial results in the given field, we decided to perform an extensive and original measurement of a total of 172 combinations of different electrode sizes, various conductive ink mixtures and ink layer thicknesses. Thanks to this, it will be possible, in the future, to select a suitable combination of electrodes and inks when designing pressure sensors for industrial and agricultural applications without the need to perform time-consuming preparatory measurements. The aim of the measurements is also to determine the usable working range of the pressures and the corresponding sensitivity for certain combinations of electrodes and inks, and to also exclude those variants which are unsuitable for the given purposes. This paper presents the introductory part of the measurements, which aims to verify the methodology of the measurements on a test plate at robotised workspace that is connected to a PC in real time via the program LabView. The described introductory measurements proved our methodology to be suitable to the given purpose; however, there minor problems emerged with the actual working pressure range of the transducer and the consequential necessary adjustments of the control program.