The title of Martins’ award-winning paper is "Novel MI-based (FracBot) Sensor Hardware Design for Monitoring Hydraulic Fractures and Oil Reservoirs,” which was coauthored by ECE Ph.D. student Abdallah Alshehri and ECE’s Byers Professor in Telecommunications Ian F. Akyildiz. Akyildiz serves as Martins’ and Alshehri’s advisor and leads the Broadband Wireless Networking Lab. 

The paper proposes a novel prototype of magnetic induction (MI)-based wireless sensor node (FracBot) to be used as a platform for a new generation of Wireless Underground Sensor Networks (WUSNs) for monitoring hydraulic fractures and unconventional reservoirs and measuring other wellbore parameters.

The research team designed and developed the hardware of the MI-based wireless sensor for short range communication using near field communication (NFC) as a physical layer combined with energy harvesting capability and ultra-low power requirements. The team realized these characteristics using cost-effective and commercial off-the-shelf components and confirmed the performance of the design via theoretical and experimental evaluation, thus showing that the FracBot can operate perpetually with minimum energy radiated conditions.