Systematic study of packaging designs on the performance of CMOS thermoresistive micro calorimetric flow sensors

Abstract

We systematically study the effect of two packaging configurations for the CMOS thermoresistive micro calorimetric flow (TMCF) sensors: S-type with the sensor chip protrusion-mounted on the flow channel wall and E-type with the sensor chip flush-mounted on the flow channel wall. Although the experimental results indicated that the sensitivity of the S-type was increased by more than 30%; the corresponding flow range as compared to the E-type was dramatically reduced by 60% from 0–11 m s−1 to 0–4.5 m s−1. Comprehensive 2D CFD simulation and in-house developed 3D numerical simulations based on the gas-kinetic scheme were applied to study the flow separation of these two packaging designs with the major parameters. Indeed, the S-type design with the large protrusion would change the local convective heat transfer of the TMCF sensor and dramatically decrease the sensors’ performance. In addition, parametric CFD simulations of the packaging designs provide inspiration to propose a novel general flow regime map (FRM), i.e. normalized protrusion d* versus reduced chip Reynolds number Re*, where the critical boundary curve for the flow separation of TMCF sensors was determined at different channel aspect ratios. The proposed FRM can be a useful guideline for the packaging design and manufacturing of different micro thermal flow sensors.