Development of a strain measurement method utilizing a rectangular microstrip patch antenna

Detecting structural strain has become a momentous part of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), however, conventional strain sensing technologies cannot meet the requirements of long-time, low-cost, real-time, etc. In order to surmount these shortcomings, rectangular microstrip patch antennas were designed, manufactured and utilized as strain sensors to detect the structural strains, and the detailed experimental setup was presented as well. A linear relationship with the coefficient of-1 between the percentage of resonant frequency shift of the microstrip patch antenna and the structural strain was theoretically derived and validated by the HFSS^TM simulation as well as the experimental results.