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A novel dual-band circularly polarized MIMO wearable antenna is screen-printed on a cotton polyester fabric to operate at 2.45 and 5.8 GHz wireless body area network communications. The MIMO fabric antenna is realized with two circularly polarized wearable antennas arranged in orthogonal directions, which provides a less than -10 dB bandwidth of 400 MHz from 2.2 to 2.6 GHz and 800 MHz from 5.3 to 6.1 GHz, with impedance bandwidth of 17 and 14% for lower and higher bands, respectively. The antenna provides an axial ratio bandwidth (below 3 dB) of 3% from 2.4 to 2.47 GHz and 8% from 5.45 to 5.94 GHz. The proposed MIMO antenna is integrated with an artificial magnetic conductor, which helps to create isolation between the human body and antenna, which also minimizes the specific absorption rate (SAR). The antenna SAR performance is tested on the HUGO model, which gives 0.025, 0.035 W/Kg for 1g tissue at 2.45 and 5.8 GHz. Furthermore, the antenna provides good MIMO characteristics such as envelope correlation coefficient, diversity gain, and channel capacity. The antenna is suitable for flexible wearable applications due to fabric substrate, screen printing, low SAR, and lightweight.

I dagens samhälle blir det allt viktigare att fortbilda sig under hela sitt yrkesverksamma liv. För att möta efterfrågan på det livslånga lärandet har Mittuniversitetet utvecklat och genomfört ett antal kurser som riktar sig mot yrkesverksamma ingenjörer. Detta arbete presenterar våra erfarenheter av att ge dessa kurser, med en tyngdpunkt på studenternas upplevelser. Syftet med detta är att bygga upp en vetenskaplig bas för vad vi gör som är bra, men även vad som kan förbättras och förändras. Målsättningen är att göra dessa specialanpassade kurser riktade mot yrkesverksamma ingenjörer så givande och flexibla som möjligt. Våra initiala resultat visar bland annat att studenternas negativa upplevelser ofta var kopplade till antagningsförfarandet och det praktiska genomförandet av kurserna. Man hade svårigheter med att hitta hur man skulle registrera sig på kursen och att tidsramen för registrering kunde vara ett problem. Läroplattformen uppfattades som svår att överblicka och det förekom även viss otydlighet gällande var undervisningen skulle äga rum. Den positiva responsen i utvärderingarna gällde främst det faktiska kursinnehållet, då man ansåg att uppgifter och kursmaterial var givande. Vidare uppskattades kursupplägget, att man kunde kombinera studierna med arbete. Framledes kommer vi att fortsätta med dessa utvärderingar i takt med att kurserna ges, och därefter anpassa vårt mottagande och kommunikationen med studenterna. Även kursupplägget ses över kontinuerligt via den återkoppling vi mottar.

A design scheme for embedding a chipless radio frequency identification (RFID) tag in a quick response (QR) code is proposed and demonstrated. By searching for QR modules that can be metalized to form a loop resonator in the edge area and to load the loop in the central area, the chipless RFID tag with an optimized loaded-loop resonator can be designed in the QR code. A specific loop genetic operator is proposed for optimization searching. The optimized loaded-loop resonator has a sharp dominant resonant peak at frequency as low as possible and a harmonic resonant peak at frequency as high as possible, which provides large space for data encoding of chipless RFID. By removing or demetalizing the metalized loading modules, the resonant frequency can be tuned conveniently for frequency shift keying (FSK) coding. For demonstration, the chipless RFID tag embedded in the QR code is designed and tested. It is shown that the RFID tag allows at least nine distinct resonant frequencies for simple FSK coding, which indicates a coding capacity of 3.17 bits and a normalization coding density of approximately 501.78 bits/ $\lambda _{\mathrm {g}}^{2}$ /GHz for the chipless RFID tag embedded in the QR code.

This paper presents a posture recognition system aimed at detecting sitting postures of a wheelchair user. The main goals of the proposed system are to identify and inform irregular and improper posture to prevent sitting-related health issues such as pressure ulcers, with the potential that it could also be used for individuals without mobility issues. In the proposed monitoring system, an array of 16 screen printed pressure sensor units was employed to obtain pressure data, which are sampled and processed in real-time using read-out electronics. The posture recognition was performed for four sitting positions: right-, left-, forward- and backward leaning based on k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), support vector machines (SVM), random forest (RF), decision tree (DT) and LightGBM machine learning algorithms. As a result, a posture classification accuracy of up to 99.03 percent can be achieved. Experimental studies illustrate that the system can provide real-time pressure distribution value in the form of a pressure map on a standard PC and also on a raspberry pi system equipped with a touchscreen monitor. The stored pressure distribution data can later be shared with healthcare professionals so that abnormalities in sitting patterns can be identified by employing a post-processing unit. The proposed system could be used for risk assessments related to pressure ulcers. It may be served as a benchmark by recording and identifying individuals’ sitting patterns and the possibility of being realized as a lightweight portable health monitoring device.

A novel Monte Carlo‐based indoor radio‐frequency identification (RFID) positioning scheme is proposed for dual‐antenna RFID systems with the cooperation of dual‐antenna joint rec-tification. By deploying reference passive RFID tags on the ground to establish an RFID tag‐based map, indoor self‐positioning of a moving platform carrying an RFID reader with two forward‐look-ing antennas can be simply implemented by looking up the positions of responded RFID tags at each time step of movement, and estimating the platform position by using the proposed Monte Carlo‐based algorithm. To improve the positioning accuracy of Monte Carlo‐based positioning, each antenna channel, with its own footprint on the ground, may rectify its position estimation by using the tag position information interrogated by the other antenna channel. The algorithm for dual-antenna rectification is proposed. The performance of the proposed Monte Carlo‐based self‐posi-tioning scheme is demonstrated by both simulation and experiment tests. Some factors in a practical indoor‐positioning system, such as the reference tag distribution pattern, reader antenna footprint size, and footprint overlap, are discussed. Some guide rules for deploying the RFID indoor‐posi-tioning system are also reported.

Optical fiber microducts are joined together by mechanical joints. These mechanical joints are bulky, require more space per joint, and are prone to air pressure leakage and water seepage during service. A battery powered electrofusion welding system with a resistive-type joint has been recently developed to replace mechanical joints. These resistive-type electrofusion joints require physical connectors for power input. Due to a different installation environment, the power input connectors of resistive optical fiber microduct joints may corrode over time. This corrosion of connectors will eventually cause water seepage or air pressure leakage in the long run. Moreover, due to connector corrosion, resistive-type optical fiber microduct joints cannot be re-heated in future if the need arises. In this study, an inductively coupled electrofusion-type joint was proposed and investigated. This inductive-type electrofusion joint is not prone to long-term corrosion risk, due to the absence of power connectors. Inductive-type electrofusion joints can be re-heated again for resealing or removal in the long run, as no metal part is exposed to the environment. The battery powered inductive welding system can be easily powered with a 38 volts 160 watt-hour battery. The inductive-type electrofusion joint was welded within one second, and passed a 300-newton pull strength test and a 10-bar air pressure leakage test. It was demonstrated that the power input requirement for inductive electrofusion joints is 64% higher than that of resistive electrofusion joints. However, these inductive joints are relatively easy to manufacture, inexpensive, have no air leakage, and no water seepage risk in highly corrosive environments.

The development of wearable health devices is an emerging technology, and pressure sensors have been widely used in several of these applications. Plenty of research within pressure sensors is focused on tactile sensing and artificial skin. In this paper, a highly flexible and stretchable pressure sensor is presented. The sensor comprises stretchable thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) film as substrate and stretchable conductive inks as electrodes and sensing material. Screen printing is used to fabricate electrodes and pressure sensing components on TPU sheets. Electrical and mechanical properties of the fabricated sensors indicate good mechanical and electrical stability while retaining pressure sensing properties and marginal deterioration even after 100 elongation cycles. The findings show that the presented stretchable pressure sensor has a great potential for usage on surfaces where bending and stretching will occur while retaining nearly all of its electrical and mechanical capabilities. The proposed sensor may be employed as a wearable device to detect human movements.

Automatic design of planar directional coupler can be implemented by multi-objective optimization searching for the optimal planar fragment-type structure (FTS). The 2-bit FTS description scheme may include necessary fine structures in fragments to enhance the FTS design. By coding the coupler design space on PCB in 2-bit FTS, defining the FTS design matrix, and searching for the optimal structure, directional coupler can be designed without any structure presetting or artificial intervention. The scheme is demonstrated by designing 10-dB wideband directional coupler with 2-bit FTS scheme. The designed directional couplers are fabricated and tested to show maximum directivity of 58 dB with 36% operation bandwidth.

At present, optical fiber microducts are coupled together by mechanical types of joints. Mechanical joints are thick, require a large space, and reduce the installation distance in multi-microduct installation. They may leak or explode in the blown fiber installation process. Mechanical joints are subjected to time dependent deterioration under long service times beneath the earth's surface. It may start with a small leakage, followed by damage due to water freezing inside the optical fiber microduct. Optical fiber microducts are made up of high-density polyethylene, which is considered most suitable for thermoelectric welding. For thermoelectric welding of two optical fiber microducts, the welding time should be one second, and should not cause any damage to the inner structure of the microducts that are being coupled. To fulfill these requirements, an LTspice simulation model for the welding system was developed and validated. The developed LTspice model has two parts. The first part models the power input to joule heating wire and the second part models the heat propagation inside the different layers of the optical fiber microduct and surrounding joint by using electro-thermal analogy. In order to validate the simulation results, a battery powered prototype welding system was developed and tested. The prototype welding system consists of a custom-built electrofusion joint and a controller board. A 40 volt 4 ampere-hour Li-Ion battery was used to power the complete system. The power drawn from the battery was controlled by charging and discharging of a capacitor bank, which makes sure that the battery is not overloaded. After successful welding, a pull strength test and an air pressure leakage test were performed to ensure that the welded joints met the requirements set by the mechanical joints. The results show that this new kind of joint and welding system can effectively replace mechanical joints in future optical fiber duct installations.

This paper presents and evaluates three new designs of fibre optic cable ducts for jetting. The three designs are longitudinal ridges with square, triangular and semicircular geometries. The effects of the geometries are evaluated with regards to electrostatic force, fluid drag force and jetting length with limited push force. An optimal design is suggested, with triangular longitudinal ridges on the inner surface of the duct.

By specifying objective functions defining the two bands to be notched with high roll-off criteria (ROCs), optimization searching for the best fragment-type etch pattern on ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna is implemented by using multi-objective optimization. The optimization with too many objective functions requires special treatment to improve the searching efficiency. In this design, two slits are preset on appropriate positions on different sides of the UWB radiator to constrain the decision space for etch pattern searching and yield two initial notched bands to speed up the optimization. For demonstration, a UWB patch antenna is designed with dual-band notches of ROC = 0.63 at WiMAX band and ROC = 0.65 at WLAN band. Both the simulation and measurement results indicate that there is significant improvement of the selectivity of the dual-band notches.

At present, optical fiber microducts are joined together by mechanical type joints. Mechanical joints are bulky, require more space in multiple duct installations, and have poor water sealing capability. Optical fiber microducts are made of high-density polyethylene which is considered best for welding by remelting. Mechanical joints can be replaced with welded joints if the outer surface layer of the optical fiber microduct is remelted within one second and without thermal damage to the inner surface of the optical fiber duct. To fulfill these requirements, an electro-thermal model of Joule heat generation using a copper coil and heat propagation inside different layers of optical fiber microducts was developed and validated. The electro-thermal model is based on electro-thermal analogy that uses the electrical equivalent to thermal parameters. Depending upon the geometric shape and material properties of the high-density polyethylene, low-density polyethylene, and copper coil, the thermal resistance and thermal capacitance values were calculated and connected to the Cauer RC-ladder configuration. The power input to Joule heating coil and thermal convection resistance to surrounding air were also calculated and modelled. The calculated thermal model was then simulated in LTspice, and real measurements with 50 µm K-type thermocouples were conducted to check the validity of the model. Due to the non-linear transient thermal behavior of polyethylene and variations in the convection resistance values, the calculated thermal model was then optimized for best curve fitting. Optimizations were conducted for convection resistance and the power input model only. The calculated thermal parameters of the polyethylene layers were kept intact to preserve the thermal model to physical structure relationship. Simulation of the optimized electro-thermal model and actual measurements showed to be in good agreement.

Electronic textiles, integrating functional electronics circuits into fabric materials, are emerging as an important branch of flexible circuits. In this paper, we introduce a novel material combination for electronic textiles that can be used in implementing hybrid electronics. This type of circuits is fabricated by laminating patterned aluminum foils onto a nonwoven substrate in a high-speed roll-to-roll method. An isotropic conductive adhesive and an anisotropic conductive adhesive are used to assemble standard surface mount device components onto the fabricated circuits. The surface mount techniques are characterized by means of contact resistance measurements, component bonding strength tests, circuit bending tests, and scanning electron microscopy. An NFC tag with relative humidity sensing functionality is fabricated to evaluate the fabricated circuits to an electronic system level.

Implementing electronics systems on paper is an important area of flexible circuit technologies. One of the approaches is to print conductive inks onto paper substrates, on which silicon-based surface mount device components are mounted. However, one of the problems is that the printed conductors have unneglectable resistivity. In this paper, we present paper-based flexible circuits, using copper and aluminium conductors that are laminated onto paper substrates using a high-speed roll-to-roll method. Edge roughness inspections and repeated two-point bending tests are carried out to evaluate the manufactured flexible circuits. Three surface mount techniques are used to assemble standard surface mount device components onto the flexible circuits, including an isotropic conductive adhesive, an anisotropic conductive adhesive, and a low-temperature solder paste. Several characterizations are performed to the surface mount techniques, including contact resistance measurements, component bonding strength tests, assembled circuit bending tests, and scanning electron microscopy. The results of the characterizations suggest that flexible circuits made from Cu with paper substrate achieve satisfactory results for mechanical reliability, all surface mount techniques, and have the potential to be used on automatic component assembly lines. In order to test whether such flexible circuits and surface mount techniques can be used in implementing electronics systems, passive NFC tags with relative humidity sensing functionality are made, which are interrogated by an NFC equipped mobile phone., SmartArea

Optical fiber duct installation requires blowing of cleaning sponges for dirt and moisture removal before blowing the fiber cables. The traditional method requires one operator that blows the sponge and one operator in the receiving end that manually evaluate the sponges until a dry sponge is received. The proposed system eliminates the need of a second operator by introducing a solution for automatic sponge detection and characterization of moisture in sponges at the receiving end. An optical sensor is used for detection and a capacitive sensor is developed to measure the sponge's wetness. Sensor data is automatically transmitted back to the operator at the feeding end via a mobile phone. The system is characterized to work with sponges ranging from saturated with wetness to what is deemed as dry.

Prolonged sitting inadequacies cause pressure ulcer to many individuals, especially to disadvantaged with reduced mobility. The measurement of distributed pressure and detection of irregular sitting postures is essential for preventing the risk of developing pressure ulcer. In this paper, a pressure sensing system capable of recognizing sitting postures by means of measuring interface pressure through printed pressure sensors is presented. A thin and flexible large area sensor is screen-printed using silver flake and carbon particle inks and comprises 16 sensing elements. For the evaluation of practical usability, the sensor characterization is carried out by conducting stability, repeatability, drift and bending tests. The performance of the sensor is checked under varying environmental conditions. Sitting posture detection accuracy above 80 % is achieved using a classification algorithm for four different sitting postures. Pressure distribution is monitored at a scanning rate of 10 Hz. A low power and small form factor of read-out electronics enables a compact packaging inside the seat cushion. The presented sensor design targets smart wheelchairs, but it is extendable to much larger areas, for example to be used in beds. The proposed sensing system would be of a great assistance for caregivers and health professionals., SMART (Smarta system och tjänster för ett effektivt och innovativt samhälle)

The table is a result from cyclic strain test with 25 % and 50 % elongations of screen-printed stretchable conductive tracks on thermoplastic polyurethane.

IDPOS

IDPOS

RF electronics commonly incorporate PCB-materials with low loss tangents, which limits its use for large-area applications due to its high cost. This work verifies one alternative solution how non-conventional flexible circuit materials can be used to manufacture large functional surfaces for RF-based applications. Laminated Al foils are used for conducting layers and a flexible foam material is used for substrate. An RFID reader system has been developed to demonstrate the functionality, comprising of eight microstrip antenna elements arranged in a SP4T switching structure covering an area of 1.2 m × 0.6 m. Each antenna element is individually addressable with aid of distributed digital and analogue multiplexer circuitry and it is shown how these components can be soldered directly onto the Al conductors. The constructed system shows good RF performance, both with regards to the materials and to the interconnections with the distributed multiplexer circuitry. It can perform far-field RFID tag reading above its surface without dead zones and the system characterization implies that the concept can be further expanded to cover geometrical areas up to 1000 square meters., Accepted Manuscript online 15 December 2017

Fragment-type etch patterns are proposed and designed on ultra-wideband planar antenna to acquire sharp roll-off band notch. Multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is applied to achieve the optimization searching of the best fragment-type etch pattern by setting multiple objectives to acquire the exact notched band and challenge the roll-off criterion (ROC) of band notch. Efficiency of the design can be improved by properly presetting slits on the patch radiator. For demonstration, designs with different slit presetting are implemented and tested. With single slit preset, band notch of ROC=0.72 at the WLAN band ranging from 5.15 GHz to 5.85GHz is acquired.

RFID readers serve the obvious role of extracting information from RFID tagged objects. Objects without RFID tags or objects with tags that for some reason are unreadable will not be noted at all when positioned within an RFID reader antenna's interrogation zone. In this paper, we investigate how UHF RFID reader systems for smart shelf applications could also be used for classification and distance estimation of non RFID tagged objects, if the reader modules provide access to antenna S-parameters. The investigation is performed with an inset fed microstrip antenna where objects of different materials are positioned at different heights above the antenna. It is shown how objects are detected and classified in terms of their materialistic properties through S-parameter analysis and how the distance from the antenna to the object could be estimated.

Antennas can always be affected by the attached materials. Such a property is here integrated with RFID technology of designing a passive RFID tag which is sensitive to a chosen object material. A good sensing ability will help the tag bonding up with the chosen material, which will benefit material security a lot. To achieve a high tag-object bonding sensitivity, a fragmented-type tag is introduced here. When permittivity of attached object material changes a little bit, readability of the tag will degrade rapidly. The sensitive properties are investigated by simulated and articulated experimentations.

In the biomedical sector, pressure sensors exhibit an important role towards monitoring and recognition of sitting posture for wheelchair users, which is helpful for pressure ulcer prevention and cure. In this paper, a flexible and inexpensive screen printed large area pressure sensing system is presented. The large area sensor comprise three layers, is able to cancel-out false pressure detection, and achieves a sitting classification accuracy over 80 percent. The sensor matrix contains 16 sensors distributed over an area of 23.5 cm × 21.5 cm and the pressure points are monitored at a scanning rate of 77 Hz. The sensor system provides wireless communication and a Windows based GUI is developed that allows real-time presentation of pressure data by means of a pressure map. The presented sensor design targets smart wheelchairs but is suitable for any low cost and high throughput pressure distribution monitoring systems., SMART (Smarta system och tjänster för ett effektivt och innovativt samhälle)

In this study, a design scheme for high-performance tight coupling microstrip coupler is proposed by adding a fragment-type compensated structure between two loosely coupled lines. Owing to its flexibility and adaptability, the fragment-type compensated structure can not only provide a quarter-wavelength phase shift for coupling enhancement, but also compensate the difference in the phase velocities of the even- and odd-modes for high directivity. Design of the fragment-type compensated structure can be implemented by multi-objective optimisation searching with several design objectives characterising tight coupling couplers. A high-efficiency optimisation searching strategy by using two-dimensional median filtering operator is employed to improve the efficiency of multi-objective optimisation. For demonstration, a high-performance 3-dB tight coupling directional coupler operating at 2 GHz is designed. The measurement data demonstrates a maximum directivity of 47 dB, above 25 dB directivity in a 21.5% bandwidth, a maximum variation of 0.3 dB in the coupling level and a maximum power division ratio of 0.6 dB, which indicate the overall performance better than the previously reported 3-dB couplers. In addition, a simplified theoretical analysis of the proposed coupler and full-wave simulated results are provided for better understanding of the fragment-type compensated structure.

This article presents the design, manufacturing, and measurements of antennas on paper, realized using ink-jet printing of conductive inks based on nano-silver particles (nSPs). The extraction of the substrate characteristics such as the dielectric constant and dielectric loss is performed using a printed ring resonator technique. The characterization of the nSPs conductive inks assesses different parameters as sintering time and temperature. Two antennas are realized corresponding to the most common needs for wireless sensor networks in Trains Environment. The first one is a patch antenna characterized by a broadside radiation pattern and suited for operation on metallic structures. The second one is a quasi-yagi antenna, with an end fire radiation pattern and higher directivity, without requiring a metallic ground plane. Both antennas present a good matching (S11 < -20 dB and S11 < -30 dB, respectively) and acceptable efficiency (55% and 45%, respectively) for the paper substrate used at the center frequency of 2.4 GHz, corresponding to the first channel of the IEEE 802.15.4 band.

This paper describes mounting of standard surface mount component packages on a paper substrate using an industrial solder process with a low-temperature solder. The use of paper as a substrate for printed flexible electronics is becoming more and more widespread as an alternative to the more commonly used plastic substrates, such as polyethylene and polyimide. Paper has the benefits of being environmentally friendly, recyclable, and renewable, as well as inexpensive. It is shown that it is possible to mount standard surface mount device components on paper substrates using low-temperature solder in an industrial soldering process. The contact resistances obtained are mostly low, although the yield of functioning contacts is low. The reason is cracking of the substrate coating layer that goes through the printed silver tracks. It was observed that the cracks appear mostly close to the contact pads, the most likely cause is thermal mismatch between the coating layer and solder and also thermal expansion of the photo paper resin coating. The smallest component package size, 0201, resulted in the highest yield of >80% with decreasing yield for larger package sizes., IDPOS

Near Field Communication (NFC) is currently being widely launched as a new wireless feature in cell phones, allowing NFC equipped phones to act as 13.56 MHz RFID readers or as tags as well as to utilize NFC for short range inter-phone communication. While many applications based on the most basic NFC cell phone technology have started to appear, this work addresses the possibility to not only retrieve static data such as ID numbers and web addresses from NFC tags but also sensor data. The work shows how commercially available NFC chips can be used for communicating sensor data to a smart phone, either directly through existing analogue input ports or by powering and communicating with an additional microcontroller. The work also shows how an NFC tag can operate as an actuator rather than a sensor, which is exemplified by the construction of a bi-stable switch capable of switching 250 Volt / 2 Ampere. Power transfer capability via the NFC interface is characterized with coils designed for different resonant frequencies as is inkjet printed coils on paper substrate where components are soldered with a low temperature solder compound., MOBISENSE

A novel design for a microstrip wideband directional coupler is proposedby using fragment-type structures. The use of a fragment-type structuremay provide satisfactory flexibility and excellent performance. For agiven design space, a fragment-type wideband coupler can be designed byfirst gridding the space into fragment cells and then metallizing thefragment cells selected by a multi-objective optimization searchingalgorithm, such as a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based ondecomposition combined with enhanced genetic operators. Fordemonstration, a 20-dB wideband microstrip directional coupler isdesigned and verified by test. A 45% bandwidth centered at 2 GHz hasbeen measured in terms of maximum variation of 0.5 dB in the 20-dBcoupling level. In the operation band, the designed coupler hasdirectivity above 37 dB, and a maximum directivity of 48 dB at 2 GHz. Inaddition, some technique aspects related to multi-objective optimizationsearching, such as effects of design space, control of coupling level,and efficiency consideration for optimization searching, are furtherdiscussed. Fragment-type structures may also be used to designhigh-performance wideband directional couplers of tight coupling level.

Printed electronics is a rapidly developing field where many components can already be manufactured on flexible substrates by printing or by other high speed manufacturing methods. However, the functionality of even the most inexpensive microcontroller or other integrated circuit is, at the present time and for the foreseeable future, out of reach by means of fully printed components. Therefore, it is of interest to investigate hybrid printed electronics, where regular electrical components are mounted on flexible substrates to achieve high functionality at a low cost. Moreover, the use of paper as a substrate for printed electronics is of growing interest because it is an environmentally friendly and renewable material and is, additionally, the main material used for many packages in which electronics functionalities could be integrated. One of the challenges for such hybrid printed electronics is the mounting of the components and the interconnection between layers on flexible substrates with printed conductive tracks that should provide as low a resistance as possible while still being able to be used in a high speed manufacturing process. In this article, several conductive adhesives are evaluated as well as soldering for mounting surface mounted components on a paper circuit board with inkjet printed tracks and, in addition, a double sided Arduino compatible circuit board is manufactured and programmed.

Thin inkjet-printed tracks of silver nanoparticles have previously been observed to show a non-reversible decrease in resistance when exposed to a high degree of relative humidity and thus providing sensor functionality with a memory effect. This paper provides a more in-depth explanation of the observed humidity sensor effect that originates from inkjet-printed silver nanoparticle sensors on a paper substrate. It is shown that the geometry of the sensor has a large effect on the sensor's initial resistance, and therefore also on the sensor's resistive dynamic range. The importance of the sensor geometry is believed to be due to the amount of solvent from the ink interacting with the coating of the paper substrate, which in turn enables the diffusion of salts from the paper coating into the ink and thus affecting the silver ink.

Fragment structure should find its application in acquiring high isolation between multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas. By gridding a design space into fragment cells, a fragment-type isolation structure can be constructed by metalizing some of the fragment cells. For MIMO isolation design, cells to be metalized can be selected by optimization searching scheme with objectives such as isolation, return losses, and even radiation patterns of MIMO antennas. Due to the exibility of fragment-type isolation structure, fragment-type structure has potentials to yield isolation higher than canonical isolation structures. In this paper, multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition combined with genetic operators (MOEA/D-GO) is applied to design fragment-type isolation structures for MIMO patch antennas and MIMO PIFAs. It is demonstrated that isolation can be improved to different extents by using fragment-type isolation design. Some technique aspects related to the fragment-type isolation design, such as effects of fragment cell size, design space, density of metal cells, and efficiency consideration, are further discussed., Correspondence Address: Wang, G.; Department of Electronic Engineering and Information Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China; email: gwang01@ustc.edu.cn