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Title: Thin Silicon MEMS Contact-Stress Sensor

Conference ·

This work offers the first, thin, MEMS contact-stress (CS) sensor capable of accurate in situ measruement of time-varying, contact-stress between two solid interfaces (e.g. in vivo cartilage contact-stress and body armor dynamic loading). This CS sensor is a silicon-based device with a load sensitive diaphragm. The diaphragm is doped to create piezoresistors arranged in a full Wheatstone bridge. The sensor is similar in performance to established silicon pressure sensors, but it is reliably produced to a thickness of 65 {micro}m. Unlike commercial devices or other research efforts, this CS sensor, including packaging, is extremely thin (< 150 {micro}m fully packaged) so that it can be unobtrusively placed between contacting structures. It is built from elastic, well-characterized materials, providing accurate and high-speed (50+ kHz) measurements over a potential embedded lifetime of decades. This work explored sensor designs for an interface load range of 0-2 MPa; however, the CS sensor has a flexible design architecture to measure a wide variety of interface load ranges.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
W-7405-ENG-48
OSTI ID:
982891
Report Number(s):
LLNL-CONF-421290; TRN: US201014%%106
Resource Relation:
Conference: Presented at: Hilton Head 2010 - Solid-State Sensors, Actuators, and Microsystems Workshop, Hilton Head Island, SC, United States, Jun 06 - Jun 10, 2010
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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