VTechWorks staff will be away for the winter holidays starting Tuesday, December 24, 2024, through Wednesday, January 1, 2025, and will not be replying to requests during this time. Thank you for your patience, and happy holidays!
 

Dual-Use Strain Sensors for Acoustic Emission and Quasi-Static Bending Measurements

Abstract

In this paper, a MEMS piezoresistive ultrathin silicon membrane-based strain sensor is presented. The sensor’s ability to capture an acoustic emission signal is demonstrated using a Hsu–Nielsen source, and shows comparable frequency content to a commercial piezoceramic ultrasonic transducer. To the authors’ knowledge, this makes the developed sensor the first known piezoresistive strain sensor which is capable of recording low-energy acoustic emissions. The improvements to the nondestructive evaluation and structural health monitoring arise from the sensor’s low minimum detectable strain and wide-frequency bandwidth, which are generated from the improved fabrication process that permits crystalline semiconductor membranes and advanced polymers to be co-processed, thus enabling a dual-use application of both acoustic emission and static strain sensing. The sensor’s ability to document quasi-static bending is also demonstrated and compared with an ultrasonic transducer, which provides no significant response. This dual-use application is proposed to effectively combine the uses of both strain and ultrasonic transducer sensor types within one sensor, making it a novel and useful method for nondestructive evaluations. The potential benefits include an enhanced sensitivity, a reduced sensor size, a lower cost, and a reduced instrumentation complexity.

Description

Keywords

acoustic emission, MEMS, strain sensor, source location, quasi-static plate bending

Citation

Stiefvater, J.; Kang, Y.; de Clerck, A.; Mao, S.; Jones, N.; Deem, J.; Wicks, A.; Ruan, H.; Ng, W. Dual-Use Strain Sensors for Acoustic Emission and Quasi-Static Bending Measurements. Sensors 2024, 24, 1637.