A Wide-Range Transmission Line-Based Linear Displacement Sensor

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    6 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    Accurate displacement measurement is critical for many applications. Recently, a variety of radio frequency-based linear displacement sensing techniques were introduced. However, the application of the previously proposed techniques was either not fully demonstrated toward realizing the sensor and/or they were limited in measurement range to less than 4 cm. This article introduces a fully characterized wide-range radio frequency-based contactless linear displacement sensor. The sensor consists of a short-circuited 50- Ω microstrip line and a movable current-sensing resonant probe. The probe accurately measures the sinusoidal magnetic field distribution along the short-circuited transmission line from a certain distance above it. The measured normalized field values are mapped to displacement using the inverse of the sinusoidal function in the postprocessing stage. The proposed technique is comprehensively validated using simulations and measurements of a compact sensor prototype operating at 727.5 MHz. Furthermore, the merits of the proposed sensor compared to the widely accepted linear variable differential transformer (LVDT) displacement transducer are highlighted here. The metrological characterization of the proposed sensor shows that it offers a very wide dynamic range of 68 mm with a standard deviation of the estimation error of less than 0.09 mm (0.13% of the full range). It is also demonstrated that the proposed sensor outperforms the commercial LVDT transducer in terms of overall displacement measurement accuracy. In general, the proposed sensor is scalable and has a theoretical dynamic range of λ /2 making it suitable for a wide range of applications.

    Original languageBritish English
    Pages (from-to)18609-18623
    Number of pages15
    JournalIEEE Sensors Journal
    Volume23
    Issue number16
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 15 Aug 2023

    Keywords

    • Current sensor
    • displacement sensor
    • magnetic field distribution
    • microstrip line
    • microwave
    • radio frequency
    • resonant loop
    • short circuited

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