An investigation to the design of high-precision wind sensing device based on piezoelectric array

Abstract

A new wind sensing device based on bimorphs array is designed for apperceiving wind direction and velocity, whose structure is an L-shaped cantilevers array. A coupling model of the array is proposed to predict the response voltage stimulated by wind. By extracting the response voltage ([Formula: see text]) on each bimorph cantilever, the values of wind direction ([Formula: see text]) and velocity ([Formula: see text]) can be calculated in terms of the geometric relation. Further, the relations among wind errors, array amounts ( m) and array radius ( r) are acquired, and m & r can be utilized to decreasing angle error [Formula: see text] and velocity error [Formula: see text] of wind. The calculated and experimental results show that, increasing m initially yields decreasing these two errors, then it begins to increase the errors when m is larger than 6. The minimal wind angle and velocity errors of the array are 0.14° and 0.34%, respectively, at actual wind of 13.4 m/s, m = 6 and r = 20 mm. Meanwhile, increasing r can decrease [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], Besides, for calculating 20 random incidence wind angles, respectively, the range of wind velocity error is from 0.34% to 0.87%, the range of wind angle error is from 0.12°to 0.38°, and the response time is 10 ms.