Evaluation of Electrical Resistance of Electrodes with Conductive Ink for Agriculture Application Using Computer Technology

The article presents the ongoing research, which aims to select suitable electrodes and mixtures of conductive inks, which will be used as a converter between pressure and electrical quantities in the design of planar pressure transducers. In the described research, we continue in our previous work and in the work of other authors who have previously dealt with the properties of conductive inks and electrodes. Due to the only partial results in the given field, we decided to perform an extensive and original measurement of total 172 combinations of different electrode sizes, various conductive ink mixtures and ink layer thicknesses. Thanks to this, it will be possible in the future to select a suitable combination of electrodes and inks when designing pressure sensors for industrial and agricultural applications without the need to perform time-consuming preparatory measurements. The aim of the measurement is also to determine the usable working range of pressures and the corresponding sensitivity for certain combinations of electrodes and inks, and also to exclude those variants which are unsuitable for the given purposes. This paper presents the introductory part of the measurement, which aims to verify the methodology of the measurement on a test plate at robotized workspace, that is connected in real time with PC via the program LabView. The described introductory measurement proved our methodology to be suitable to the given purpose; however, there emerged minor problems concerning the actual working pressure range of the transducer and consequential necessary adjustments of the control program.