Active Thermal Sensor for Improved Distributed Temperature Sensing in Haptic Arrays

Abstract

The efficacy of integrating temperature sensors into compliant pressure sensing technologies, such as haptic sensing arrays, is limited by thermal losses into the substrate. A solution is proposed here whereby an active heat sink is incorporated into the sensor to mitigate these losses, while still permitting the use of common VLSI manufacturing methods and materials to be used in sensor fabrication. This active sink is capable of responding to unknown fluctuations in external temperature, that is, the temperature that is to be measured, and directly compensates in real time for the thermal power loss into the substrate by supplying an equivalent amount of power back into the thermal sensor. In this paper, the thermoelectric effects of the active heat sink/thermal sensor system are described and used to reduce the complexity of the system to a simple one-dimensional numerical model. This model is incorporated into a feedback system used to control the active heat sink and monitor the sensor output. A fabrication strategy is also described to show how such a technology can be incorporated into a common bonded silicon-on-insulator-(BSOI-) based capacitive pressure sensor array such as that used in some haptic sensing systems.

A capacitive sensor using resin thermoplastic elastomer and carbon fibers for monitoring pressure distribution

“…A regular array of capacitance (C-R-C, R is the section resistance of CFs) was formed. The pressure distribution perpendicular to the arrangement of CFs is monitored (Cheneler et al, 2018).…”

Novel Approach of Non-linearity Analyses of Resistive Temperature Sensors

“…They were developed for the first time for oceanographic research. The main element of these researches is a thermistor -an element that changes its resistance depending on the ambient temperature [13].…”

Issues in Vision, Semi-autonomous Control, Haptics and Manipulation in Robotics for Nuclear Decommissioning

“…One strategy for monitoring tool wear and load, and hence cutting efficiency, indirectly is by monitoring the power required to drive the spindle motor of the machine tool or local temperature rise due to cutting [24,25]. Such a technique could be employed as it simply requires a power monitor device and an algorithm that takes into account the power consumed by the idle-running spindle and its dependence on the thermal state of the machine tool.…”