An integrated temperature-compensated flexible shear-stress sensor microarray with concentrated leading-wire

Flexible shear stress sensor is quite important for characterizing curved surface flows. In this work, a novel integrated shear stress sensor microarray is designed with twenty parallel channels, which share the concentrated leading-wire to transmit the ground signal. Electrical pads in rows are easily connected to the circuits with two separate Wheatstone bridges and constant-temperature-difference mode operation is provided for the hot-wires. Temperature crosstalk between adjacent hot-wires is prevented well and the effectiveness of the temperature compensated circuits is verified. Relatively large output response is obtained as the shear stress varies and the sensitivity of the sensors is measured about 0.086 V-2/Pa-1/3 with nonlinearity lower than 1%, revealing high performance characteristic of the sensors. (C) 2016 AIP Publishing LLC.