RFID sensing as accurate as the best sensors on the market, validated for an entire winter in freezing cold

Billions of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) passive tags are produced yearly to identify goods remotely. New research and business applications are continuously arising, including recently localization and sensing to monitor earth surface processes. Indeed, passive tags can cost 10 to 100 times less than wireless sensors networks and require little maintenance, facilitating years-long monitoring with ten's to thousands of tags. This study reviews the existing and potential applications of RFID in geosciences. The major and mature application today is the study of coarse sediment transport during floods or debris flows, using tags placed into pebbles. More recently, tag localization was used to monitor landslide displacement, with a centimetric accuracy. Sensing tags were used to detect a displacement threshold on unstable rocks, and to monitor the moisture or the temperature of the soil. Propagation-based sensing was applied to monitor the properties of a volume of snow. RFID sensors, available today, can be applied to monitor other parameters, such as the vibration of structures, the tilt of unstable boulders, the strain of a material, or the salinity of water. We discuss the key challenges for using RFID monitoring more broadly in geosciences: the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to collect data or localize tags, the increase in reading range and duration, the ability to use tags placed under ground, snow, water or vegetation, and the optimization of economical and environmental cost. As a pattern, passive RFID could fill a gap between wireless sensor networks and manual measurements, to collect data efficiently over large areas, during several years, at high spatial density and moderate cost. 

The first time an RFID monitoring system was deployed in mountain conditions on a landslide

Induced polarization is a geophysical method investigating the ability of rocks to store reversibly electrical charges under a slowly alternating electrical field. The material property of interest is a complex-valued electrical conductivity with an in-phase component associated with conduction and a quadrature component associated with polarization. We investigated the relationship between complex conductivity spectra over the frequency range 1 mHz–45 kHz and the specific surface area (SSA) of 28 volcanic core samples extracted from a wellbore drilled for the Humuʻula Groundwater Research Project in Hawaii. The specific surface area of these samples was determined through the Brunauer, Emmett and Teller (BET) method. Subcritical nitrogen adsorption experiments were conducted using two different instruments and the samples were prepared in both pellets and powder forms. The BET specific surface area is found to be highly correlated to the cation exchange capacity of the core samples measured by the cobalthexamine method. The in-phase conductivity itself can be decomposed as the sum of a bulk contribution associated with conduction in the bulk pore water and a surface conductivity associated with conduction in the electrical double layer coating the grains. The surface conductivity, the quadrature conductivity, and the normalized chargeability (defined as the difference between the in-phase conductivity at high and low frequencies) are observed to be linearly correlated to the specific surface area or the surface per volume ratio of the core samples, which can be considered as proxy of alteration. These trends are consistent with those shown by sedimentary rocks. This new data set demonstrates that the induced polarization method can be potentially used to image alteration in volcanic environments.

We performed complex conductivity measurements on 28 core samples from the hole drilled for the Humu’ula Groundwater Research Project (Hawai’i Island, HI, USA). The complex conductivity measurements were performed at 4 different pore water conductivities (0.07, 0.5, 1.0 or 2.0, and 10 S m −1 prepared with NaCl) over the frequency range 1 mHz to 45 kHz at 22 ± 1◦ C. The in-phase conductivity data are plotted against the pore water conductivity to determine, sample by sample, the intrinsic formation factor and the surface conductivity.The intrinsic formation factor is related to porosity by Archie’s law with an average value of the cementation exponent m of 2.45, indicating that only a small fraction of the connected pore space controls the transport properties. Both the surface and quadrature conductivities are found to be linearly related to the cation exchange capacity of the material, which was measured with the cobalt hexamine chloride method. Surface and quadrature conductivities are found to be proportional to each other like for sedimentary siliclastic rocks. A Stern layer polarization model is used to explain these experimental results. Despite the fact that the samples contain some magnetite (up to 5 per cent wt.), we were not able to identify the effect of this mineral on the complex conductivity spectra. These results are very encouraging in showing that galvanometric induced polarization measurements can be used in volcanic areas to separate the bulk from the surface conductivity and therefore to define some alteration attributes. Such a goal cannot be achieved with resistivity alone.