Design and Analysis of a New Hair Sensor for Multi-Physical Signal Measurement

Abstract

Abstract:A new hair sensor for multi-physical signal measurements, including acceleration, angular velocity and air flow, is presented in this paper. The entire structure consists of a hair post, a torsional frame and a resonant signal transducer. The hair post is utilized to sense and deliver the physical signals of the acceleration and the air flow rate. The physical signals are converted into frequency signals by the resonant transducer. The structure is optimized through finite element analysis. The simulation results demonstrate that the hair sensor has a frequency of 240 Hz in the first mode for the acceleration or the air flow sense, 3115 Hz in the third and fourth modes for the resonant conversion, and 3467 Hz in the fifth and sixth modes for the angular velocity transformation, respectively. All the above frequencies present in a reasonable modal distribution and are separated from interference modes. The input-output analysis of the new hair sensor demonstrates that the scale factor of the acceleration is 12.35 Hz/g, the scale factor of the angular velocity is 0.404 nm/deg/s and the sensitivity of the air flow is 1.075 Hz/(m/s) 2 , which verifies the multifunction sensitive characteristics of the hair sensor. Besides, the structural optimization of the hair post is used to improve the sensitivity of the air flow rate and the acceleration. The analysis results illustrate that the hollow circular hair post can increase the sensitivity of the air flow and the II-shape hair post can increase the sensitivity of the acceleration. Moreover, the thermal analysis confirms the scheme of the frequency difference for the resonant transducer can prominently eliminate the temperature influences on the measurement accuracy. The air flow analysis indicates that the surface area increase of hair post is significantly beneficial for the efficiency improvement of the signal transmission. In summary, the structure of the new hair sensor is proved to be feasible by comprehensive simulation and analysis.

Fluid-structure interaction study of spider’s hair flow-sensing system

“…Several numerical simulation works are available in the literature, but they are mainly related, for instance, to the engineering design and analysis of bio-inspired micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) (see, e.g., Ref. [16]). Numerical studies on the biological structures, in fact, are still poorly addressed and further investigations are needed in order to characterize the performance of spiders' hairs.…”

Design and Development of a Hair-like Sensor with Bridge-Type Flexible Amplification Mechanisms

“…The hair-like sensor can realize the effective measurement of linear/angular velocity, acceleration, and other information so that it can be widely used in lateral line systems, inertial navigation systems, flow sensing, situation awareness, and so forth. According to the different realization principles, the hairlike sensor can be divided into piezo-resistive [5][6][7][8], capacitive [9][10][11], piezoelectric [12,13], resonant [14][15][16][17][18][19], and so on [1,3,4]. Resonant sensors can realize quasi-digital signal output, which can effectively avoid the problem of low measurement accuracy caused by analogto-digital conversion.…”

Mode localized artificial hair sensor with enhanced linearity applied for dual-axis air flow sensing

“…Due to their small volume, low power consumption, large dynamic range, low cost, etc, micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) AHSs possess great application potential in attitude control, environmental monitoring and target positioning. A variety of AHSs based on different sensitive principles, including capacitive [17,18], piezoresistive [19,20], piezoelectric [21], optical [22], magnetic [23], resonant approaches [24,25], have been reported. In [26], Moshizi et al developed a flexible hair flow sensor based on piezoresistive vertical graphene nanosheets with a mazelike structure.…”