The pressure and temperature inside the tire is mainly monitored by the tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS). In order to improve the integration of the TPMS system, moreover enhance the sensitivity and temperature-insensitivity of pressure measurement, this paper proposes a microelectromechanical (MEMS) chip-level sensor based on stress-sensitive aluminum–silicon hybrid structures with amplified piezoresistive effect and temperature-dependent aluminum–silicon hybrid structures for hardware and software temperature compensations. Two types of aluminum–silicon hybrid structures are located inside and outside the strained membrane to simultaneously realize the measurement of pressure and temperature. The model of this composite sensor chip is firstly designed and verified for its effectiveness by using finite element numerical simulation, and then it is fabricated based on the standard MEMS process. The experiments indicate that the pressure sensitivity of the sensor is between 0.126 mV/(V·kPa) and 0.151 mV/(V·kPa) during the ambient temperature ranges from −20 °C to 100 °C, while the measurement error, sensitivity and temperature coefficient of temperature-dependent hybrid structures are individually ±0.91 °C, −1.225 mV/(V °C) and −0.150% °C−1. The thermal coefficient of offset (TCO) of pressure measurement can be reduced from −3.553%FS °C−1 to −0.375%FS °C−1 based on the differential output of the proposed sensor. In order to obtain the better performance of temperature compensation, Elman neural network based on ant colony algorithm is applied in the data fusion of differential output to further eliminate the temperature drift error. Based on which, the overall measured error is within 3.45 kPa, which is less than ±1.15%FS. The TCO is −0.017%FS °C−1, and the thermal coefficient of span is −0.020%FS °C−1. The research results may provide a useful reference for the development of the high-performance MEMS composite sensor for the TPMS system.
In order to correct the solar radiation error of relative humidity, the mainstream capacitive sounding humidity sensor HC103M2 is selected and investigated by simulation analysis and experimental verification. First, the basic theories for solar radiation error and sensor error itself are elaborated, and simulational and experimental platforms are introduced. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method is utilized to theoretically investigate the dry error of the humidity sensor caused by solar radiation heating, which is related to radiation intensity, altitude, and solar elevation angle as well as reflectivity, thickness, and shape of the shield. Then, in order to verify the accuracy of the simulation, an experimental platform including a humidity sensor and two temperature sensors to measure the solar radiation heating is built to analyze the relative error of humidity obtained by the CFD simulation and experiment. It is found that their maximum deviation is 3.30% and the average error is 1.94%, which indicates that the calculation using the CFD method is accurate and feasible. In order to easily and operationally predict the solar radiation heating of the humidity sensor, a back propagation (BP) neural network fusion algorithm based on three inputs of radiation intensity, air pressure, and solar elevation angle is proposed. Compared with the solar radiation heating obtained by CFD simulation, the maximum absolute error is about 0.2 K, and the relative error of humidity is about ±1.30%. Finally, a case of vertical humidity profile correction considering the temperature-sensitive error of HC103M2 is analyzed. The response time of sensor measurement and the airflow into the shield are discussed as well. The corrected results after taking solar radiation heating into account are more similar to those measured by RS92 and cryogenic frost point hygrometer (CFH). This result shows that the prediction model is accurate, which may be applied to correct the dry error and further improve the accuracy of humidity measurement.
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