Variable Response of a Thermally Tuned MEMS Pressure Sensor

Authors

Robert A. Lake, Air Force Institute of Technology
Ronald A. Coutu Jr., Air Force Institute of Technology

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-1-2016

Abstract

A typical microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) pressure sensor consists of a thin, deformable membrane and sensing element such as a piezoresistive element which is used to measure the amount of deflection in response to an applied pressure. Previous efforts demonstrated that buckled membranes, from silicon on insulator (SOI) wafers, can be thermally tuned via joule heating. By applying heat to the membrane through a resistive heating element, compressive stress is induced in the membrane causing it to buckle further out of plane and increasing its overall stiffness response. It is demonstrated that by increasing the stiffness of the membrane, the response to an increase in pressure can be varied and its overall sensitivity to pressure can be reduced by up to 62%.

Comments

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This is an Open Access article published by Elsevier and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

DOI

10.1016/j.sna.2016.05.018

Source Publication

Sensors and Actuators A: Physical (ISSN 0924-4247 | e-ISSN 1873-3069)

Recommended Citation

Lake, R. A., & Coutu, R. A. (2016). Variable response of a thermally tuned MEMS pressure sensor. Sensors and Actuators A: Physical, 246, 156–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sna.2016.05.018.