Simulation Research on the Natural Gas Flow Sensor Based the MEMS Technology

Due to its unique advantages, the MEMS technology exhibits obvious interdisciplinary characteristics, and is crossly applied with the sensor technology that yields the MEMS sensor technology. The emerging MEMS sensor technology then gained many unique advantages, such as small volume, light weight, high precision, and high integration etc. In this paper, the temperature field distribution and the flow field distribution of the thermal gas flow sensor based on the MEMS technology are simulated and discussed. The simulation results show that the temperature near the area of the heating resistor is the highest when there is no gas flow, and that the temperature field is symmetrically distributed along the x-axis. However, when the gas flows passing through, the symmetry of the temperature field is destroyed, and the farther away from the heating resistor, the more seriously the symmetry is destroyed. At the same time, the greater the vertical height above from the surface of the heating resistor, the more serious the asymmetry of the temperature field. In the y-direction, the fluid velocity distribution in the area that far away from the surface of the heating resistor is very uniform and basically with no fluctuation. However, in the area that near the surface of the heating resistor, the velocity field distribution fluctuates greatly, especially at the corners of the edges of the resistors. The main reason is the local influence caused by the geometric structure of the resistor.