Research of a Novel Ultra-High Pressure Sensor with High-Temperature Resistance.

Guo-Dong Zhang,Xin-Chen Wang,Yu-Long Zhao,Xue-Yong Wei,Yun Zhao

doi:10.3390/mi9010005

Abstract

Ultra-high pressure measurement has significant applications in various fields such as high pressure synthesis of new materials and ultra-high pressure vessel monitoring. This paper proposes a novel ultra-high pressure sensor combining a truncated-cone structure and a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) piezoresistive element for measuring the pressure up to 1.6 GPa. The truncated-cone structure attenuates the measured pressure to a level that can be detected by the SOI piezoresistive element. Four piezoresistors of the SOI piezoresistive element are placed along specific crystal orientation and configured as a Wheatstone bridge to obtain voltage signals. The sensor has an advantage of high-temperature resistance, in that the structure of the piezoresistive element can avoid the leakage current at high temperature and the truncated-cone structure separates the piezoresistive element from the heat environment. Furthermore, the upper surface diameter of the truncated-cone structure is designed to be 2 mm for the application of small scale. The results of static calibration show that the sensor exhibits a good performance in hysteresis and repeatability. The temperature experiment indicates that the sensor can work steadily at high temperature. This study would provide a better insight to the research of ultra-high pressure sensors with larger range and smaller size.

Highlights

Ultra-high pressure sensors are of great importance in many special civil and military applications, such as high pressure synthesis of new materials, pressure calibration of diamond anvil cell, shock wave propagation, explosive detonation, and high-speed impact
The design concepts of those structures can be divided into two main broad categories such as (a) the measured pressure is directly applied to the sensitive element; and (b) the sensitive element is separated from the measured pressure by Micromachines 2018, 9, 5; doi:10.3390/mi9010005
This paper proposes a novel structure combining a truncated-cone section and an SOI piezoresistive element for ultra-high pressure sensor with the measuring range of 0–1.6 GPa

Summary

Introduction

Ultra-high pressure sensors are of great importance in many special civil and military applications, such as high pressure synthesis of new materials, pressure calibration of diamond anvil cell, shock wave propagation, explosive detonation, and high-speed impact. Numerous ultra-high pressure sensors based on various sensing principles—including piezoresistive, piezoelectric, capacitive, and optical fiber—have been developed [1]. The piezoelectric pressure sensor must be combined with a charge amplifier because of its high output impedance and it can only measure the dynamic pressure [2]. The capacitive sensor possesses large nonlinearity, for the restriction of sense principle [3]. Optical-fiber-grating sensor’s structure is complicated, which makes output signal conditioning complex and sensor packaging difficult [4]. The piezoresistive sensor has been mainly used to measure the ultra-high pressure because of low output impedance, large output signal, excellent accuracy and good dynamic property. There are many papers proposing numerous ultra-high pressure piezoresistive sensors with different structures. The design concepts of those structures can be divided into two main broad categories such as (a) the measured pressure is directly applied to the sensitive element; and (b) the sensitive element is separated from the measured pressure by Micromachines 2018, 9, 5; doi:10.3390/mi9010005 www.mdpi.com/journal/micromachines

Methods

Results

Conclusion