An Integrated Temperature Compensation Method for Thermal Expansion-based Angular Motion Sensors

Abstract

In this work, we present an integrated ambient temperature compensation method for a thermal expansion- based angular motion (TEAM) sensor system based on both theoretical analysis and experimental investigations. The theoretical study using the extended 2D model indicates that the sensor sensitivity is susceptible to the thermal properties of the working fluid which can be affected by the ambient temperature (Ta). Moreover, the temperature compensation algorithm with the consideration of the working fluid’s thermal properties (Compensation I) was predicted by our model, for the first time, and applied to effectively compensating the sensitivity variation of the TEAM sensor. The sensor in the experiments show a competitive sensitivity of 0.6434mV/°/s compared with the reported thermal-based angular motion sensors. Besides, the experimental compensation results of the TEAM sensor at different ambient temperatures of 25.1°C~50°C revealed an excellent temperature-insensitive output with the maximum variation (δ <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">max</inf> ) of 1.88% and the temperature drift of sensitivity (TDS) of 591ppm/°C, in comparison with Compensation II without considering the thermal properties (δ <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">max</inf> = 20.37%) and the uncompensated counterpart (δ <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">max</inf> = 36.28%).