• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.497-503
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• 2010

This paper reports a chemomechanical explosive sensor based on a thin polymer membrane. The sensor consists of thin parylene membrane and electrodes. Parylene membrane is functionalized with 4-mercaptophenol which interacts strongly with nitrotoluene based explosives. The membrane deflection caused by molecular interaction between the surface and explosives is monitored by capacitance between the membrane and the substrate. To measure the capacitance, electrodes are formed on the membrane and the substrate. While the previous cantilever system requires a bulky optical measuring system, this purely electric monitoring method offers a compact and effective system. Thus, this explosive sensor can be readily miniaturized and used in the field. The developed sensor can reliably detect dinitrotoluene and its limit of detection is evaluated as approximately 110 ppb.

• Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.85-94
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• 1998

Due to relatively high permittivity of water in soils, we placed the soil condenser into soils to measure the soil moisture content. The soil condenser was made with two insulated iron sticks. The capacitance of the soil condenser was determined by the pulse period from RC type oscillation circuit and the highest voltage output accepting 10MHz pulse. After zero point adjustment, the measured relative capacitance percentage (RCS) to the standard condenser obtained by the oscillation circuit almost linearly correlated with the end depth of the sensor submerged in water. The RC type oscillation was disturbed by many sensor installed in a close distance in one place, presumably resulting in that the sensor sticks played as a interfering antennas generating or accepting electron waves from them. The temperature dependance of the output from the sensors could be corrected through experimentally determined revision function. Although lineal correlation was found between soil moisture and RCS, users should derive their own correlation function for every sensor to measure soil moisture, because the outputs were influenced by the installation depth and layout in the soil. The voltage type sensor responded inversely with soil moisture content and so was not suitable to the accurate measurement of soil moisture, but allows high economic benefit in various application such as simplified measurement of soil moisture and irrigation line control because of its low component count. The voltage type moisture sensor could be reinforced by relay controlling circuit to open and to close the solenoid valves respectively at optimal limits of the least and the most soil moisture according to user's adjustment.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.287-291
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• 2004

A capacitive type humidity sensor has been fabricated using a polyimide film without hydrophobic elements and its characteristics has been evaluated for hermeticity measurement of micro packages. For a highly sensitive humidity sensor, a polyimide film without hydrophobic elements has been synthesized and used instead of using a commercial one in which 7 group elements such as fluorine or chlorine are included. Sensitivity, stability and hysteresis has been performed to characterize the fabricated sensors. The sensitivity defined as normalized percent capacitance change was 0.3751%RH and hysteresis was 0.77% in the range of 10%RH to 90%RH. Maximum deviation from the average capacitance measured for 120 minutes at 50%RH was 0.25%. The proposed humidity sensor can be used for hermeticity measurement of micro packages.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.208-213
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to optimize the design of a capacitive pressure sensor element using the simulation of electrical characteristics. The simulation of the ceramic sensor diaphragm ($Al_2O_3$) was performed by permitting pressure to change the curvature of the diaphragm. The pressure capacitance ($C_P$) was increased from 19.63 pF to 15.26 pF by applying pressure because the distance between the electrodes has been changed from $30{\mu}m$ to $15{\mu}m$. When the thickness of the diaphragm was changed to 0.46~0.52 mm, a larger capacitance change showed in accordance with the reduced thickness, which means an increase of sensitivity. However, considering the viewpoint of the signal linearity, it was selected for the optimum thickness of the diaphragm to 0.50 mm. The designed sensor element based on simulated results was tested to measure the output characteristics. Comparing of simulated and measured results, there was a margin of error of approximately 2%.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.24-27
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• 2017

In this study, I developed a simple and low cost process-printing a silver, carbon, dielectric, adhesive layer on PET films using screen printing technology and bonding the two films face-to-face-to fabricate a low price capacitive pressure-mapping sensor. Both electrodes forming the pressure measuring capacitor are arranged between the two PET films similar to a sandwich. Therefore, the sensor has the advantage of minimizing the influence of external noise. In this study, a $10{\times}10$ capacitance-type pressure-mapping sensor was fabricated and its characteristics were analyzed.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.93-98
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• 2018

In this paper, an energy-efficient 11.49-bit successive approximation register (SAR) capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC) for capacitive sensors with a figure of merit (FoM) of 31.6 pJ/conversion-step is presented. The CDC employs a SAR algorithm to obtain low power consumption and a simplified structure. The proposed circuit uses a capacitive sensing amplifier (CSA) and a dynamic latch comparator to achieve parasitic capacitance-insensitive operation. The CSA adopts a correlated double sampling (CDS) technique to reduce flicker (1/f) noise to achieve low-noise characteristics. The SAR algorithm is implemented in dual operating mode, using an 8-bit coarse programmable capacitor array in the capacitance-domain and an 8-bit R-2R digital-to-analog converter (DAC) in the charge-domain. The proposed CDC achieves a wide input capacitance range of 29.4 pF and a high resolution of 0.449 fF. The CDC is fabricated in a $0.18-{\mu}m$ 1P6M complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process with an active area of 0.55 mm2. The total power consumption of the CDC is $86.4{\mu}W$ with a 1.8-V supply. The SAR CDC achieves a measured 11.49-bit resolution within a conversion time of 1.025 ms and an energy-efficiency FoM of 31.6 pJ/step.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.155-159
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• 2003

The polypyrrole and polyaniline thin film sensors which were made by chemical polymerization were employed to detect ethanol gas. With a single sensor element we can obtain characteristic patterns of behaviour across a very wide frequency range when measuring either resistance or capacitance. Impedance spectroscopy was employed to study the gas sensing behavior of both capacitance and resistance based sensors with conducting polymer as the active sensing element.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.19 no.9
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• pp.2082-2088
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• 1995

In this paper, we designed and fabricated the magnetic bearings and built-in type cylindrical capacitive transducers for improving the vibration characteristics of rotating shaft. The eddy current and magnetic field from the electromagnet of the bearing don't affect the measuring signal of the capacitive type transducers so that it is possible to locate the capacitive sensor plates around the magnetic bearing poles and can improve the spillover problem which is induced by the noncollocation of the sensors and actuators. According to the sensitivity calibration schemes using a X-Y table, the cylindrical capacitive transducers have a good linearities in the .+-.70.mu.m range from the geometric center of the sensor plates. The measured results also show high displacement sensitivities of the sensors. According to the performance test of the magnetic bearing which is controlled by the analog PD controllers, we found that the built-in capacitive transducer system successfully measures the journal displacement in the magnetic field and therefore the magnetic bearing system supports the rotating shaft up to 12,000 rpm.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.989-998
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• 2012

A ratio type of capacitance measurement circuit is proposed to measure an extremely small value of the fF capacitance on this paper. This measurement circuit is formed with a switched-capacitor integrator, a comparator, and logic circuit blocks to control the switches. It converts the measured ratio value between the known value of on-chip capacitor and the unknown value of capacitor to the digital signal. The fF capacitance with minimized error can be obtained by calculating this ratio. This proposed circuit is designed with standard CMOS $0.18{\mu}m$ process, and various HSpice simulations prove that this capacitance measurement circuit is able to measure the capacitance under 5fF with less than ${\pm}0.3%$ error rate.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.1298-1302
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• 2011

This study describes the development of an electrochemical array immunochip for the detection of IgG. Interdigitated immunochip platforms were fabricated by sputtering gold on a glass wafer by using MEMS process and then were coated with Eudragit S100, an enteric polymer, forming an insulating layer over the working area of immunochips. The breakdown of the polymer layer was exemplified by the catalytic action of urease which, in the presence of urea, caused an alkaline pH change. This subsequently caused an increase of the double layer capacitance of the underlying electrode. Used in conjunction with a competitive immunoassay format, this allowed the ratio of initial to final electrode capacitance to be directly linked with the concentration of analyte, i.e. IgG. Responses to IgG could be detected at IgG concentration as low as $250\;ngmL^{-1}$ and showed good linearity up to IgG concentration as high as $20\;{\mu}gmL^{-1}$.