Characterization of a PCB Based Pressure Sensor and Its Joining Methods for the Metal Membrane

Essential quality features of pressure sensors are, among other accuracy-related factors, measurement range, operating temperature, and long-term stability. In this work, these features are optimized for a capacitive pressure sensor with a measurement range of 10 bars. The sensor consists of a metal membrane, which is connected to a PCB and a digital capacitive readout. To optimize the performance, different methods for the joining process are studied. Transient liquid phase bonding (TLP bonding), reactive joining, silver sintering, and electric resistance welding are compared by measurements of the characteristic curves and long-term measurements at maximum pressure. A scanning electron microscope (SEM) with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) analysis was used to examine the quality of the joints. The evaluation of the characteristic curves shows the smallest measurement errors for TLP bonding and sintering. For welding and sintering, no statistically significant long-term drift was measured. In terms of equipment costs, reactive joining and sintering are most favorable. With low material costs and short process times, electric resistance welding offers ideal conditions for mass production.

Parameter Optimization Method for Identifying the Optimal Nonlinear Parameters of a Miniature Transducer with a Metal Membrane

This study proposes a parameter optimization method for identifying the optimal nonlinear parameters of a miniature transducer with a metal membrane. Specifically, a nonlinear lumped parameter model (LPM) of a miniature transducer that accounts for predicted displacement in a manner that is consistent with the displacement measured by a high-precision capacitance micro-displacement sensor is proposed. To avoid application of the proposed optimization method to an ill-posed problem, this paper proposes a constrained equation that is derived from the relationships of nonlinear parameters. The Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (BFGS) algorithm is used to minimize the objective function in order to obtain an appropriate solution from the proposed nonlinear LPM. The numerical simulation results and a discussion of the experiments are presented. The numerical simulation verification demonstrated that the presented method can estimate the suitable nonlinear parameters for the displacement with errors. With regard to empirical verification, the empirical investigations showed that the proposed method could accurately assess the nonlinear parameters of a miniature transducer with a metal membrane.