This paper presents design, fabrication and characterization of flexible capacitive graphene oxide (GO) based humidity sensors, which can be used in many applications, such as environmental protection, civil engineering, and agriculture. They consist of interdigitated electrodes ink-jet printed on a polyimide flexible substrate and GO based sensing layer. Measurement setup for testing and characterization was developed in laboratory conditions. The dependence of the capacitance and resistance of the GO based humidity sensors on the percentage of the applied humidity is presented. The main advantage of developed GO based capacitive humidity sensors is very large variation of capacitance, almost five orders of magnitude, compared to the previously demonstrated sensors. The other advantages of the sensors are fast response-recovery time, excellent reproducibility of the measurement results and use of cost-effective additive ink-jet technology.
This paper describes the design, simulation and fabrication of an inductive angular position sensor on a flexible substrate. The sensor is composed of meandering silver coils printed on a flexible substrate (Kapton film) using inkjet technology. The flexibility enables that after printing in the plane, the coils could be rolled and put inside each other. By changing the angular position of the internal coil (rotor) related to the external one (stator), the mutual inductance is changed and consequently the impedance. It is possible to determine the angular position from the measured real and imaginary part of the impedance, in our case in the frequency range from 1 MHz to 10 MHz. Experimental results were compared with simulation results obtained by in-house developed software tool, and very good agreement has been achieved. Thanks to the simple design and fabrication, smaller package space requirements and weight, the presented sensor represents a cost-effective alternative to the other sensors currently used in series production applications.
Purpose
– This paper aims to present a prototype of a capacitive angular-position sensor which exploits advantages of flexible/printed electronics. The novelty of the sensor is that the capacitor structure is placed at the circumference of the rotor and stator, that it posses two channels (capacitor structures) electrically shifted for p/4 and that the rotor is common for both channels. The electrodes of the sensing capacitor are digitated, providing a triangular transfer function.
Design/methodology/approach
– This sensor prototype consists of two flexible inkjet-printed silver electrodes forming a cylindrical capacitor structure. One of them is wrapped around the stator and another is wrapped around the rotor part of a simple mechanical platform used to precisely adjust the angular displacement.
Findings
– The capacitance as a function of angular position was measured using an inductance capacitance impedance (LCZ) Meter, and results are presented for a full-turn measurement range. The experimental results are compared with analytical ones and very good agreement has been achieved.
Originality/value
– The proposed capacitive sensor structure can be used as an absolute or an incremental encoder with different resolutions, and it can be applied in automotive industry or robotics.
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