Capacitive temperature sensing via displacement amplification

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel capacitive temperature sensor design that uses displacement amplification caused by differential thermal expansion to achieve large capacitance changes with temperature.

Contribution

The paper presents a new low-cost, simple design for capacitive temperature sensors utilizing displacement amplification through layered materials with different thermal expansion coefficients.

Findings

Numerical simulations confirm the displacement amplification effect.

A low-cost prototype demonstrates significant capacitance change with temperature.

The design offers a potential route for efficient, low-cost temperature sensing.

Abstract

We propose the realization of capacitive temperature sensors based on the concept of displacement amplification. Our design features two high coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) metallic layers separated by a low-CTE dielectric layer; conductive and dielectric layers are then separated by a thin air gap and glued together at a few locations. As the temperature increases, the high-CTE layer tends to expand more than the low-CTE one. Owing to the constraint to planar expansion imposed by the low-CTE layer, this results in large out-of-plane displacements of the high-CTE layer -- hence the displacement amplification term. In our case, the high-CTE layer buckles and causes a reduction of the gap between conductive and dielectric layers; in turn, this results in a large change of capacitance. First, we illustrate the concept via numerical simulations. Then, we realize a low-cost prototype of such sensor by using aluminum foil as conductor, paper as dielectric, and by gluing the layers together with cyanoacrylate. Our results demonstrate the potential of this simple design as a route towards efficient and low-cost temperature sensors.