Comparison study of high-sensitivity area-changed capacitive displacement transducers with low-impedance and high-impedance readout circuits.

Area-changed capacitive displacement transducers (CDTs) are widely used in the high-precision displacement measurement due to their high accuracy and large dynamic range. The preamplifier circuit is used to convert the capacitance variation signal into voltage, which requires low noise and is significant for the high-sensitivity area-changed CDTs. Current CDT preamplifiers are mainly categorized as the low-impedance preamplifier and the high-impedance preamplifier; however, their characteristics and application scopes have not been systematically compared. This paper builds comprehensive models of the low-impedance and the high-impedance preamplifiers. Then, three-electrode configurations with different electrode separations and gaps are designed to carry out displacement variation experiments with low-impedance and high-impedance readout circuits, respectively. The results show that the sensitivity decrease caused by the gap change with the high-impedance preamplifier is 70%, while the counterpart of the low-impedance preamplifier is 85%. When the gap is 0.1 mm and the width-to-separation ratio varies from 1:1 to 5:1, the sensitivity of the CDT based on the low-impedance preamplifier is increased by 64%, while the counterpart with the high-impedance preamplifier is increased by 22%. Hence, this paper gives the universal guiding rules of preamplification circuit selections for different CDT electrode configurations and application requirements. For a capacitive sensor design with large and unavoidable parasitic capacitance, the low-impedance preamplifier and a CDT with a large electrode width-to-separation ratio match best. For a capacitive sensor design requiring both a large sensitivity and good robustness to out-of-plane interferences, the high-impedance preamplifier and a CDT with a small electrode width-to-separation ratio match best.

A study on the influences of a hygrothermal environment on the compressive strength and failure criteria of asphalt mixtures based on true triaxial tests.

Based on a high-pressure servo static and dynamic true triaxial test machine (tawz-500/300), uniaxial and true triaxial tests of AC-25C asphalt mixtures under different heat moisture coupling treatments were performed, and the triaxial compressive strength value was determined by mathematical treatment. The test results show that in the range of 20-60 °C, the uniaxial and triaxial compressive strength of the AC-25C asphalt mixture decreases with increasing drying and soaking environment temperature. In the temperature range of 20-40 °C, the drying temperature sensitivity and soaking temperature sensitivity of the asphalt mixture with compressive strength and failure strain value as indices are the maximum. The increase in the intermediate principal stress can improve the triaxial compressive strength, and the increase reaches the maximum when the environmental treatment temperature is 40 °C. The maximum stress ratio is in the range of σ2/σ3 = 0.25 to σ2/σ3 = 0.5. The failure forms of uniaxial tension and triaxial tension are mainly caused by tensile stress. The influence of temperature, humidity and stress ratio on triaxial failure strength is analysed. The relationship between the failure strength and temperature coefficient k is established using a variety of failure criteria, which can provide an experimental and theoretical basis for the mechanical analysis of asphalt mixtures under complex stress states.

A high-sensitivity MEMS gravimeter with a large dynamic range.

Precise measurement of variations in the local gravitational acceleration is valuable for natural hazard forecasting, prospecting, and geophysical studies. Common issues of the present gravimetry technologies include their high cost, high mass, and large volume, which can potentially be solved by micro-electromechanical-system (MEMS) technology. However, the reported MEMS gravimeter does not have a high sensitivity and a large dynamic range comparable with those of the present commercial gravimeters, lowering its practicability and ruling out worldwide deployment. In this paper, we introduce a more practical MEMS gravimeter that has a higher sensitivity of 8 µGal/√Hz and a larger dynamic range of 8000 mGal by using an advanced suspension design and a customized optical displacement transducer. The proposed MEMS gravimeter has performed the co-site earth tides measurement with a commercial superconducting gravimeter GWR iGrav with the results showing a correlation coefficient of 0.91.

Modeling and Analysis of the Noise Performance of the Capacitive Sensing Circuit with a Differential Transformer.

Capacitive sensing is a key technique to measure the test mass movement with a high resolution for space-borne gravitational wave detectors, such as Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and TianQin. The capacitance resolution requirement of TianQin is higher than that of LISA, as the arm length of TianQin is about 15 times shorter. In this paper, the transfer function and capacitance measurement noise of the circuit are modeled and analyzed. Figure-of-merits, including the product of the inductance L and the quality factor Q of the transformer, are proposed to optimize the transformer and the capacitance measurement resolution of the circuit. The LQ product improvement and the resonant frequency augmentation are the key factors to enhance the capacitance measurement resolution. We fabricated a transformer with a high LQ product over a wide frequency band. The evaluation showed that the transformer can generate a capacitance resolution of 0.11 aF/Hz1/2 at a resonant frequency of 200 kHz, and the amplitude of the injection wave would be 0.6 V. This result supports the potential application of the proposed transformer in space-borne gravitational wave detection and demonstrates that it could relieve the stringent requirements for other parameters in the TianQin mission.

A Subnano-g Electrostatic Force-Rebalanced Flexure Accelerometer for Gravity Gradient Instruments.

A subnano-g electrostatic force-rebalanced flexure accelerometer is designed for the rotating accelerometer gravity gradient instrument. This accelerometer has a large proof mass, which is supported inversely by two pairs of parallel leaf springs and is centered between two fixed capacitor plates. This novel design enables the proof mass to move exactly along the sensitive direction and exhibits a high rejection ratio at its cross-axis directions. Benefiting from large proof mass, high vacuum packaging, and air-tight sealing, the thermal Brownian noise of the accelerometer is lowered down to less than 0.2 ng / Hz with a quality factor of 15 and a natural resonant frequency of about 7.4 Hz . The accelerometer's designed measurement range is about ±1 mg. Based on the correlation analysis between a commercial triaxial seismometer and our accelerometer, the demonstrated self-noise of our accelerometers is reduced to lower than 0.3 ng / Hz over the frequency ranging from 0.2 to 2 Hz, which meets the requirement of the rotating accelerometer gravity gradiometer.