Optimization of aerosol jet printed strain sensor design via computational simulation

Abstract

3D printing technology has been getting attention in these few year. There is an increasing interest in 3D printed circuit and sensor recently. Aerosol Jet printing technique is used for printing the strain sensor for this project. It is a contact-less and mask-less type of printing process. Thus, this allows aerosol jet to create 3D-contact. In addition, it is capable in achieving fine pitch and high resolution printing for nanomaterial. Strain gauge is widely used in various industry fields. With the used of strain sensor, dimensions that are difficult to measure such as force and stress of a objects or specimens can be measure and calculate. Thus, it is able to prevent any failure due to high stress. In this report, the simulation software ANSYS was used to optimize an aerosol jet printed strain sensor. Both the parameters and material of the design strain gauge will be adjusted in the simulation. Through simulation, the performance of the strain sensor based on different materials, substrate and patterns will be able to be estimated. Additionally, by the used of the simulation software to adjust or modify the parameters and materials, it greatly helps the user to save both the time and cost spent on conducting real-life experiments. The different experiment groups such as dimension of the strain gauge, foil grid design and material, and substrate material will be conducted to find out the factor that will affects the strain sensitivity of the strain gauge. An optimized strain gauge with gauge factor of 1.7224 is presented in this report.