A miniature silicon hot wire sensor for automatic wind speed measurements

M. Laghrouche, A. Adane, J. Boussey, S. Ameur, D. Meunier and S. Tardu

Renewable Energy, 2005, vol. 30, issue 12, 1881-1896

Abstract: In order to make air flow measurements easier and more accurate, a very small sensor has been constructed. The fabrication of such a sensor mainly consists in depositing a thin doped polycrystalline silicon layer on a 4″ silicon wafer by using a silicon—micromachined technique. At the end of the integration process, the wafer is sliced into 46 wind sensors. Each of them comprises a polycrystalline silicon layer which is 0.5μm thick, with width running from 2 to 5μm and length, from 45 to 58μm. Supplied with a dc electrical current, each layer acts as a hot wire on contact with the fluid under study. Wind speed is then measured by detecting the resistance variations caused by the thermal transfer from the heated layer to the ambient atmosphere. A microcontroller-based data acquisition system has especially been designed so as to collect the wind speed measurements arising from this kind of hot wire transducer. The integrated silicon sensors have been experimented within a wind tunnel and calibrated for air speed ranging from 0 to 35m/s. Initially intended for wall shear stress monitoring, these sensors can usefully be employed as anemometers for wind energy applications.

Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148105000121
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:30:y:2005:i:12:p:1881-1896

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2004.12.005

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().