The results show that the conductor quality factor is independent of the substrate permittivity and varies linearly with the substrate thickness. From Equation (4), t
Two-dimensional flow measurement is becoming more and more important in many applications such as meteorology, drag reduction research for aircraft and vessels [1�C4], biomedical flow detection [5] and control enhancement for Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs)/Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) [6�C9]. Conventional techniques are mostly based on Pitot tubes (including hemispherical nose probes) [10�C13] or electromechanical self-orienting vanes [12�C14], which usually protrude outside the testing body and disturb the flow they measure, need hard mechanical ties and/or intrusive pneumatic links inside.
Their fabrication and packaging processes are generally elaborate and do not meet practical requirements. When applied to small objects, more problems occur, such as big size and heavy weight, high power consumption, difficulty to install, tendency to break and so on. In recent years, many researchers have applied micromachining processes to realize microsensors and arrays for measuring flow vectors [15�C24], however, most sensors are still complex, fragile and power consuming.Ozaki’s work [14] showed the measurement of the flow-induced force in 1-Degree Of Freedom (DOF) and 2-DOF sensory hairs. The measuring probe of the 2-DOF sensor was made up of a long wire attached to the center of a cross-shaped beam with strain gauges on the four roots. It could measure the direction angle of air flow with one sensor hair.
However, the sensor was hard to fabricate and the structure was fragile and easily broken.Chen’s work [24] contains two types. One is based on an orthodox micromachined Hot Wire Anemometer (HWA). Using a plastic deformation magnetic assembly method, an out-of-plane HWA with two support Anacetrapib beams was made. They then combined three orthogonal hot wires together to form a three-dimensional sensor. The other method is based on momentum transfer principles and inspired by fish lateral line sensors, adopting a similar principle as Ozaki’s work. The fabrication for realizing these sensors is relatively complex.The works of Dong et al. [25], Kim et al. [17], Van Oudheusden et al. [23], Furjes et al. [21], de Bree et al. [22] and Van Oudheusden [19] all used thermal sensing methods to detect two-dimensional flow.
They used several heaters and temperature detectors distributed around the center of the chip to detect flow-induced temperature differences. The sensor usually consisted of multiple isolated heaters and thermometers with separate electrical connection pads and thus made the structures relatively complicated and large.This paper presents a novel flow sensor with a relatively simple structure.