Abstract
The inductive proximity sensor (IPS) is applicable to displacement measurements in the aviation field due to its non-mechanical contact, safety, and durability. IPS can increase reliability of position detection and decrease maintenance cost of the system effectively in aircraft applications. Nevertheless, the specialty in the aviation field proposes many restrictions and requirements on the application of IPS, including the temperature drift effect of the resistance component of the IPS sensing coil. Moreover, reliability requirements of aircrafts restrict the use of computational-intensive algorithms and avoid the use of process control components. Furthermore, the environment of airborne electronic equipment restricts measurements driven by large current and proposes strict requirements on emission tests of radio frequency (RF) energy. For these reasons, a differential structured IPS measurement method is proposed in this paper. This measurement method inherits the numerical separation of the resistance and inductance components of the IPS sensing coil to improve the temperature adaptation of the IPS. The computational complexity is decreased by combining the dimension-reduced look-up table method to prevent the use of process control components. The proposed differential structured IPS is equipped with a differential structure of distant and nearby sensing coils to increase the detection accuracy. The small electric current pulse excitation decreases the RF energy emission. Verification results demonstrate that the differential structured IPS realizes the numerical decoupling calculation of the vector impedance of the sensing coil by using 61 look-up table units. The measuring sensitivity increased from 135.5 least significant bits (LSB)/0.10 mm of a single-sensing-coil structured IPS to 1201.4 LSB/0.10 mm, and the linear approximation distance error decreased from 99.376 μm to −3.240 μm. The proposed differential structured IPS method has evident comparative advantages compared with similar measuring techniques.
Highlights
Operation control processes from manufacturing [1,2], to chemical metallurgy [3], electric vehicles [4,5], biological medicine [6,7], and aerospace [8,9] require the detection of the position of mechanical moving components
The direct advantage of the differential structured inductive proximity sensor (IPS) is that the proportion of sample variation ranges with distance in the dynamic range of the analog–digital converters (ADCs) is high
Given the same condition (1–7 mm), the maximum variation ranges of the single-sensing-coil structured IPS and differential structured IPS are 7.9% and 71.2% in the dynamic range of the ADC, respectively
Summary
Operation control processes from manufacturing [1,2], to chemical metallurgy [3], electric vehicles [4,5], biological medicine [6,7], and aerospace [8,9] require the detection of the position of mechanical moving components. The common high-accuracy industrial IPS, which measures inductance on the basis of a phase detection method, uses process control components similar to MCUs or DSPs [49] This type of sensor has difficulty in assuring the global reliability performance of aircraft (mean time between failure (MTBF). General IPS analog measurement methods apply step input to the sensing coil and compare the response value at a fixed moment and a given threshold to obtain the distance [60,61] This method has a simple circuit, and can reduce the resistance temperature drift through a customization of thermal resistor compensation [60,62]. Compared with that of single-sensing-coil structured IPS, and the interpolation error decreases from
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
