A Graphene-Based Wide-Band MEMS Accelerometer Sensor Dependent on Wavelength Modulation

Abstract

In this paper, a novel graphene-based optical micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometer sensor is proposed, which is relied on unique properties of graphene and wavelength modulation mechanism. The optical sensing system of the designed sensor includes a typical LED light source, a multilayer graphene finger, photo-detector (PD), and a set of integrated optical waveguides. The functional characteristics of the sensor are designed analytically and are then confirmed using numerical approaches. These characteristics of the mentioned sensor based on simulation results are an optical sensitivity of 0.2111 nm/g, a linear measurement range of −189 g to +189 g, a mechanical sensitivity of 0.4617 nm/g, a first resonance frequency of 23032 Hz, and a bandwidth of about 8 kHz. The proposed micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems (MOEMS) sensor offers several advantages, such as zero cross-axis sensitivity, a remarkably broad operational bandwidth, appropriate linearity behavior in the whole measurement range, intrinsic immunity against electromagnetic interferences (EMI), high reliability, and a significantly wider measurement range (MR), when compared with recent important contributions in the literature. These functional characteristics make the proposed optical sensor very interesting in various applications, ranging from consumer electronics to volcanology and earthquake detection, and automotive and inertial navigation. Especially, the applications which extremely broad measurement range, high sensitivity, operating in a harsh environment, and wide operational bandwidth are required simultaneously.