Membrane Deflection and Stress in Thermal Flow Sensors

Proceedings

André, Nicolas¹  Falco, Claudio²  Gardner, Ethan L. W.³  Luca, Andrea De⁴  Udrea, Florin⁵  Francis, Laurent A.⁶ 

[1] Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.;Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1PZ, UK;Flusso Ltd., Cambridge CB3 0QH, UK;ICTEAM, Université catholique de Louvain, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;Presented at the Eurosensors 2018 Conference, Graz, Austria, 9–12 September 2018.;These authors contributed equally to this work.

关键词: MEMS;    thermal expansion;    mechanical stress;    flow sensors;   

DOI  :  10.3390/proceedings2131089

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The effect of membrane deflection has been investigated for thermal flow sensors. Catastrophic membrane breakage is a common occurrence in membrane based thermal flow sensors due to thermal expansion and internal stresses. This work analyses three sensors comprising a tungsten heater embedded in buried oxide membrane with a silicon nitride passivation layer, the use of back etching creates a cavity underneath to reduce the thermal conduction. The investigation is done using interferometry to measure the membrane shape at room and operating temperature for three membranes of different sizes. As expected, the deflection increases with temperature up to 15 µm at operating temperature and with the reduction of membrane size the deflection is reduced to a minimum of 3 µm for the smallest membrane. The lower deflection measured in devices with a smaller cavity can be related to a reduced internal stress, improving the long term stability.

【 授权许可】

CC BY