Research on Temperature Compensation Technology for a Flexible Capacitive Pressure Sensing System

Area of Science:

• Aerospace Engineering
• Materials Science
• Sensor Technology

Background:

• Real-time pressure measurement in aerospace vehicles is difficult due to the need for flexible sensors on curved surfaces under combined thermal and pressure loads.
• Existing systems often struggle with accuracy and durability in these demanding environments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a temperature-compensated flexible capacitive pressure sensing system for aerospace applications.
• To address the challenges of real-time, distributed pressure monitoring on curved aerospace surfaces.

Main Methods:

• Developed an 8 × 8 flexible sensor array integrated with a multi-channel readout circuit.
• Employed time-division multiplexing and synchronous detection for signal processing.
• Utilized a Particle Swarm Optimization-Backpropagation (PSO-BP) neural network for temperature compensation and data analysis.

Main Results:

• Achieved high linearity in calibration with a correlation coefficient of 0.9998 and a maximum relative error of 2.23%.
• Demonstrated an average measurement error below 6% under coupled temperature (10-110 °C) and pressure (5-150 kPa) conditions.
• Successfully acquired in-flight data during flight experiments, showing pressure variations during key flight events.

Conclusions:

• The developed temperature-compensated flexible capacitive pressure sensing system is feasible for distributed aerospace pressure monitoring.
• The system offers high accuracy and reliability even under coupled thermal-pressure conditions.
• This technology advances real-time sensing capabilities for aerospace vehicles.