A Thermopile Detector Based on Micro-Bridges for Heat Transfer.

Na Zhou,Xuefeng Ding,Haiyang Mao,Yue Ni,Yonglong Pu,Hongbo Li

doi:10.3390/mi12121554

Abstract

A thermopile detector with their thermocouples distributed in micro-bridges is designed and investigated in this work. The thermopile detector consists of 16 pairs of n-poly-Si/p-poly-Si thermocouples, which are fabricated using a low-cost, high-throughput CMOS process. The micro-bridges are realized by forming micro trenches at the front side first and then releasing the silicon substrate at the back side. Compared with a thermopile device using a continuous membrane, the micro-bridge-based one can achieve an improvement of the output voltage by 13.8% due to a higher temperature difference between the hot and cold junctions as there is a decrease in thermal conduction loss in the partially hollowed structure. This technique provides an effective way for developing high-performance thermopile detectors and other thermal devices.

Highlights

Detector Based on Micro-Bridges for Nowadays, thermopiles, as a type of functional structure, have been widely used in different fields, including some systems and devices, such as non-contact temperature sensors [1,2,3], gas sensors [4,5,6], thermal flow sensors [7,8,9], power generators [10,11,12], and micro-calorimeters [13,14,15]
Both thermopiles consist of 16 pairs of n-poly-Si/p-poly-Si thermocouples in series
A thermopile detector based on micro-bridges for heat transfer is presented

Summary

Introduction

Detector Based on Micro-Bridges for Nowadays, thermopiles, as a type of functional structure, have been widely used in different fields, including some systems and devices, such as non-contact temperature sensors [1,2,3], gas sensors [4,5,6], thermal flow sensors [7,8,9], power generators [10,11,12], and micro-calorimeters [13,14,15]. When the novel coronavirus (2019-nCOV) epidemic disease spread all over the world in recent years, thermopiles that can detect infrared radiation in a non-contact way have been demanded globally

Methods

Results

Conclusion