I-Corps: Autonomous electronic sentinel microsensors for monitoring and logging harsh environments

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of microsensor technologies for the oil and gas industry including monitoring pressure and temperature of production, pipeline/cement integrity, and abandoned wells. Microsensors may provide an order of magnitude reduction in the cost and logistics of operations and maintenance as compared with other monitoring systems and infrastructure.

In addition, monitoring natural and/or engineered environments at scale creates a near instantaneous opportunity to respond to damage or disaster at low cost for the expected lifetime of the structure. Other applications of the proposed technology include defense, infrastructure, transportation, and other industries, and it may be possible to create secure networks for monitoring operations such as for radiation, intrusion, or damage.

This technology also may provide inexpensive devices for monitoring stress/strain, corrosion, chemical detection, acoustic crack detection, loading, and vibration to allow maintenance and repair optimization. The devices are designed to float in streams, rivers, sewers, city water supply, wastewater, pipelines, and sea currents to monitor system integrity, pollution, and other needed variables.

This I-Corps project is based on the development of miniaturized autonomous electronic microsensors and systems for monitoring and logging harsh environments that are currently size excluded, wireless, and wire-denied environments. The proposed technology has been used to measure temperature and pressure in harsh environments such as oil, gas, drilling mud, well cement, and hydraulic fracturing fluid.

Measurements are stored in onboard memory and timestamped with a continuously running clock. Upon return to the surface, the devices are read out wirelessly. Current prototypes are 9mm in diameter, may function up to 125C and 10k psi, and are packaged in two polymer layers.

The first polymer layer is designed for hermetic protection, and the second for buoyancy in oil and gas fluids and recovery from fluids produced at the surface. Research to date has shown that they survive lab testing and field testing downhole. These microsensors are based on integration of downhole capable systems (sensors, high temperature battery, communications, memory, microcontroller, and harsh environmental protective packaging) creating discreet, wireless, autonomous, and millimeter-scale data loggers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.