Dynamic Compensation of Ultra-Low-Range Pressure Sensors

A technique has been developed to compensate pressure readings from arrays of highly sensitive membrane-type pressure sensors for deflections caused by acceleration normal to the plane of the membrane using a single inertial measurement unit. By normalizing the fourth-order unsteady Kirchoff-Love equation, it can be shown that inertial body pseudoforces and applied surface pressure elicit a similar and additive response from the sensors. Inertial effects arising from linear and angular acceleration as well as angular velocity may therefore be converted to `pseudopressures' and eliminated by means of a simple linear compensation process which can be calibrated using only gravity. To demonstrate, signals from a conventional six-axis inertial measurement unit (including three orthogonal components each of angular velocity and linear acceleration) are used to provide an approximation of the acceleration of the sensing dies within a seven-channel distributed array of ultra-low pressure sensors. Applying the proposed correction reduces the maximum full-scale uncertainty of the measurements by as much as 50%.