Abstract
This paper reports an innovative flexible hot-wire senor microarray and its experimental studies for underwater wall shear stress measurement. 20 parallel channels of the hot-wire sensor are embedded between two polyimide layers for curved surface applications, which is fabricated based on micromachining processes, including platinum sputtering, nickel electroplating, etc. An accurate method to calculate the conversion factor of the compensation loop is proposed and verified for the temperature-compensated circuit. An average temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) is measured 2136.7 ppm/°C with linearity better than 0.05 % for platinum thermal resistors. Output instabilities of 0.22 and 0.63 mV are obtained in static flow and moving flow, respectively. The feasibility of the hot-wire sensors for detecting underwater wall shear stress is verified with an average sensitivity of 0.0123 \({\text{V}}^{2} /{\text{Pa}}^{1/3}.\) According to the experiment results, the flexible sensor microarray is very promising for characterizing underwater wall shear stress distributions in the boundary layer.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Y. K. Tian, H. Xie, H. L. Sun and H. Huang for their assistance on underwater testing of the sensor microarray. This research work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (61574093), Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University of Ministry of Education of China (NCET-10-0583), Science Fund Program (2013ZC57003), PreResearch Fund (9140A14010511JW0304) and National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Nano/Micro Fabrication (9140C790405110C7904).
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Tang, J., Zhang, W., Liu, W. et al. Research on a micromachined flexible hot-wire sensor array for underwater wall shear stress measurement. Microsyst Technol 23, 2781–2788 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-016-3110-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-016-3110-1