A new kind of wind sensor made up of MEMS resonators is designed in the paper capable of sensing the lift, the resistance and the turbulence of airplane wings by mounting on the surface. The designed wind sensor is made up of four MEMS wind pressure gauges fixed around a square wind resistance block which used to block the wind to change the wind pressure on the surface, and the change of wind pressure is detected by MEMS wind pressure gauges to reveal the air condition on the surface of the airplane wings. As known, a MEMS resonator is a second-order resonant system whose damping factor is mainly dependent on the air pressure, and the characteristic is often used to detecting the airtightness of a sealed chamber for the damping factor is sensitive under high vacuum, while a MEMS resonator with the damping factor sensitive at atmospheric pressure is designed in this paper for sensing wind pressure change, and the MEMS resonator is manufactured on SOI substrates with deep reactive ion etching technology. Also relations between the wind pressure change and the wind speed around a block at atmosphere is revealed by finite element simulation. Compared to traditional wind sensors such as anemometers and Venturi tubes, the designed MEMS wind sensor with a very small size is suitable to mount on different zones of a wing with a large amount to monitor the air condition and have less influence on air flow.
Room temperature electrically pumped topological insulator lasers
