Abstract
In flammable or explosive environments, an ultrasonic sensor for distance measurement poses an important engineering safety challenge, because the driving circuit uses an intermediate frequency transformer as an impedance transformation element, in which the produced heat or spark is available for ignition. In this paper, an intrinsically safe ultrasonic ranging sensor is designed and implemented. The waterproof piezoelectric transducer with integrated transceiver is chosen as an energy transducing element. Then a novel transducer driving circuit is designed based on an impedance matching method considering safety spark parameters to replace an intermediate frequency transformer. Then, an energy limiting circuit is developed to achieve dual levels of over-voltage and over-current protection. The detail calculation and evaluation are executed and the electrical characteristics are analyzed to verify the intrinsic safety of the driving circuit. Finally, an experimental platform of the ultrasonic ranging sensor system is constructed, which involves short-circuit protection. Experimental results show that the proposed ultrasonic ranging sensor is excellent in both ranging performance and intrinsic safety.
Highlights
Non-contact distance measurement is widely used for aircraft altimetry, ship docking, vehicle safety reversing and some other location detection systems
For the proposed intrinsically safe ultrasonic ranging sensor, the resolution is mainly determined by the GM3101 distance measurement chip
A test has been done in order to evaluate the different measuring performance between the proposed intrinsically safe ultrasonic ranging sensor and conventional ultrasonic ranging sensor
Summary
Non-contact distance measurement is widely used for aircraft altimetry, ship docking, vehicle safety reversing and some other location detection systems. Ultrasonic sensors are increasingly popular compared to other devices in the field of distance measurement up to a few meters, because they have advantages of low cost, easy implementation, anti-electromagnetic interference, and strong ability to adapt all kinds of targets and light intensities [11,12]. It is dangerous to let a distance measuring system to be exposed to this environment, so all the electrical devices need to be installed in explosion-proof shells, which are heavy and limits their use in the field It is much safer when an ultrasonic ranging sensor is designed with an intrinsically safe circuit. In the proposed intrinsically safe ultrasonic ranging sensor, a waterproof piezoelectric transducer transducer integrated transceiversuch is selected as theThe energy transducing because it is suitablewith for complex environments, as coal mines.
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