Research On Kidney-shaped Pressure Sensor Based On 3D Printing Technology

The kidney shaped pressure sensor has a lot of advantages,like small volume,light weight,high sensitivity,high accuracy,and it’s conformal and can be applied to aeronautics,astronautics,industry,biomedical,architecture and automotive fields.However,there are some problems in making kidney shaped pressure sensor by traditional techniques.The process is time-consuming,complex and costs much.3D printing technology,which has been developing fast these years,can effectively overcome the problems.So it will be of great importance in manufacturing the pressure sensors using 3D printing technology.A kidney shaped pressure senor based on 3D printing technology is researched in this thesis.The sensor is verified and optimized by finite element simulation.And its property is tested by experiment.The main work and results are as following:(1)The basic structure and sensing principle of kidney shaped tube pressure sensor were introduced.By using ABAQUS software,the finite element model wass built to investigate the surface strain distribution of kidney shaped tube under internal pressure.The layout of strain gages wass determined accordingly.The relationships between dimension parameters of the kidney shaped tube and sensor’s output strain,sensitivity,measuring range were analyzed by finite element simulation and controlling variables method.Then the optimum size of kidney shaped tube was obtained from the simulation results.The theoretical output strain corresponding to different internal pressure of this size was calculated.(2)Kidney shaped tube pressure sensor was made by 3D printing technology.Photosensitive resin Somos 14120 was chosen as printing material and stereo lithography apparatus(SLA)technology was chosen as printing technique.The CAD model of kidney shaped tube was built by SolidWorks.The kidney shaped tube elastic element was printed by SLA 3D printer SPS 450.After mounting and connecting the strain gages,the kidney shaped tube pressure sensor was finished.The 3D printing plan of kidney shaped tube pressure sensor using metal elastic element was also studied.Beryllium bronze QBe2,constantan 6J40,PTEF and PI were chosen as materials.The selective laser sintering(SLS)technology and magnetron sputtering technology were chosen as techniques.And 3D Systems ProX 500 was chosen as the SLS 3D printer.(3)The testing system of kidney shaped tube pressure sensor was built and the sensor was tested.The experiment result shows that the sensor has a stable performance.It has a sensitivity of 542.04με/kPa,a linearity of 0.997,a hysteresis error of 1.53%,a repeatability error of 0.85%,an accuracy error of 2.62% and a zero drift error of 0.3%.Compared with theoretical designed value,the sensor’s output error is 4.74% and sensitivity error is 0.58%.