A novel resonant pressure sensor with an improved micromechanical double-ended tuning fork resonator packaged in dry air at atmospheric pressure is presented. The resonator is electrostatically driven and capacitively detected, and the sensor is designed to realize a low cost resonant pressure sensor with medium accuracy. Various damping mechanisms in a resonator that is vibrating at atmospheric pressure are analyzed in detail, and a formula is developed to predict the overall quality factor. A trade-off has been reached between the quality factor, stress sensitivity and drive capability of the resonator. Furthermore, differential sense elements and the method of electromechanical amplitude modulation are used for capacitive detection to obtain a large signal-to-noise ratio. The prototype sensor chip is successfully fabricated using a micromachining process based on a commercially available silicon-on-insulator wafer and is hermetically encapsulated in a custom 16-pin Kovar package. Preliminary measurements show that the fundamental frequency of the resonant pressure sensor is approximately 34.55 kHz with a pressure sensitivity of 20.77 Hz/kPa. Over the full scale pressure range of 100–400 kPa and the whole temperature range of −20–60 °C, high quality factors from 1,146 to 1,772 are obtained. The characterization of the prototype sensor reveals the feasibility of a resonant pressure sensor packaged at atmospheric pressure.
24 February 2020 in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics
In this article, an electromagnetic vibrational energy harvester (EVEH) device has been designed and fabricated based on the hybrid microelectromechanical system and flexible circuit technology. The designed EVEH is composed of a disc magnet suspended by four microfabricated silicon springs above a stack of high-density flexible planar coils. At a sinusoidal acceleration with a peak-to-peak amplitude of 1 g, an output peak-to-peak voltage of 208.3 mV, and an output power of 10.5 μW are measured at the resonant frequency of 143 Hz. At an elevated acceleration of 7 g, a maximum output peak-to-peak voltage of 333.1 mV is realized with an increased magnet-coil distance of 0.65 mm.
Structured light is an optical 3D surface measurement technique with the merits of high speed and high robustness. However, the huge size of traditional digital light processing (DLP) projectors limits its convenience in numerous applications. In this paper, a one-axis MEMS mirror is used as the structured light projector in 3D modeling systems, and has the advantages of small volume and low cost. Limited by the inability to project orthogonal patterns and projection distortion, it is difficult for the one-axis MEMS mirror based 3D modeling system to obtain high accuracy through existing calibration methods. This paper proposed a calibration method for structured light 3D modeling systems that can only project stripes in one direction with projection distortion. A curved surface equation called curved light surface model was proposed to replace the ideal plane equation as the mathematic model of the projected structured light stripes. Experiment results verified that this method can significantly reduce the effect of projection distortion and an accuracy of 0.11 mm was achieved when measuring a standard dumbbell-shaped object with 201.10 mm center-to-center distance.
1 August 2021 in Sensors and Actuators A: Physical
This paper presents a micromachined resonant pressure sensor. The sensor is designed to optimize the sensitivity and reduce the cross-talk between the driving electrodes and sensing electrodes. The relationship between the sensitivity of the sensor and the main design parameters is analyzed both theoretically and numerically. The sensing and driving electrodes are optimized to get both high sensing capacitance and low cross-talk. This sensor is fabricated using a micromachining process based on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer. An open-loop measurement system and a closed-loop self-oscillation system is employed to measure the characteristics of the sensor. The experiment result shows that the sensor has a pressure sensitivity of about 29 Hz/kPa, a nonlinearity of 0.02%FS, a hysteresis error of 0.05%FS, and a repeatability error of 0.01%FS. The temperature coefficient is less than 2 Hz/°C in the range of −40 to 80 °C and the short-term stability of the sensor is better than 0.005%FS.