IoT Enabled, Leaf Wetness Sensor on the Flexible Substrates for In-Situ Plant Disease Management

Early plant disease detection and providing the control measures have become highly desirable to improve crop yield. Leaf wetness duration (LWD) is one of the essential parameters related to the development of fungal disease on the leaf canopy. To measured LWD, the leaf wetness sensor (LWS) is widely used. Commercially available LWS are made on printed circuit board (PCB) technology, which has an operational issue during field deployment such as weight of the sensor, contact resistance between the sensor and the leaves, form factor and most importantly, affordability. To mitigate the issues associated with the commercially available LWS, in this work, we have fabricated the in-house IoT-enabled and affordable electronic leaf wetness sensor on the flexible substrates, which is used for integrated plant disease management. Fabricated LWS comprises the interdigitated electrodes (IDEs) on the polyimide flexible substrate. The lab measurement results indicate that fabricated LWS on the flexible substrates offers a response of about 36000% when LWS is exposed to water w.r.t air. The observed response time of the fabricated LWS is about 10 seconds and hysteresis of about +/- 4 %. Further, sensor capacitance changes only by 6% over a temperature range from 20 degrees C to 65 degrees C. Furthermore, three fabricated sensors LWS and in-house developed internet of things (IoT) enabled systems are deployed on the Ocimum tenuiflorum (Tulsi) medical plant. Field measurement indicates that measured LWD using the fabricated flexible LWS and commercially available LWS (Phytos 31:LWS-L12), METER Group, Inc. USA) shows the absolute difference of 30 minutes.

Automated summary

This study fabricated an affordable electronic leaf wetness sensor on flexible substrates for plant disease management. The sensor showed a high response to water, short response time, and accurate measurement of leaf wetness.