Development of the floating element wall shear stress sensor with an analytical model

This paper presents an analytical model for the floating element wall shear stress sensor with capacitive sensing. It clarifies the relationships between sensor performances and structural parameters. Therefore, the analytical model promotes the efficiency and effectiveness for obtaining the optimal design scheme of the sensor. A SOI based sensor was fabricated and characterized in this study. The characterizations reveal the maximum wall shear stress of 63 Pa, a nonlinearity of 1.57%FS and the maximum dynamic sensitivity of 86.97 mV/Pa at 6.6 kHz. The experiments were repeated at least three times and the results agree well with the expectations.