Flexible Shear-Stress Sensor Skin and its Application to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Caltech Micromachining Laboratory

Project Abstract

Shear stress information is of great interest for many fluidic dynamic monitoring/diagnostics application. To obtain such information on nonplanar surfaces has long been a big challenge. This paper describes the development of flexible shear-stress sensor skin and its application on the detection of flow separation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The sensor skin contains a 1-D array of 36 shear-stress sensors, which can cover the 180° surface of the half-inch diameter semicylindrical UAV leading edge with 5° resolution. The implementation process of the sensor skin is significantly simplified by a packaging scheme based on solder-bonding and flexible printed circuit board (PCB). The flow separation along the leading edge was successfully detected by the flexible shear-stress sensor skin in both wind tunnel and real flight tests. The complete flight control system for the UAV, which is a M3 system (microsensors, microelectronics, and microactuators), was also demonstrated in the wind tunnel.

Involved Personnel

Yong Xu, Fukang Jiang, Yu-Chong Tai, Adam Huang, Chih-Ming Ho and Scott Newbern

Related Publications

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