MEMS Thermal Shear-Stress Sensors: Experiments, Theory and Modeling

Abstract

We have made many versions of MEMS thermal shear-stress sensors which have received successful applications. However, it has been found that the classical theory for conventional thermal shear-stress sensors is inapplicable to MEMS sensors. This paper then presents a systematic study of this issue and for the first time, an adequate theoretical analysis of MEMS sensors is developed and examined by experiments. The resulting 2D MEMS shearstress sensor theory, which includes heat transfer effects ignored by the classical theory, is verified by experimental data. We also perform 3D heat transfer simulation and the results agree with the testing data and support the proposed new theory.