Research work on Structural engineering approach for designing foil-based flexible capacitive pressure sensors by Dr. Aftab M. Hussain and his student Rishabh B. Mishra was accepted in IEEE Sensors Journal. The paper is based on designing flexible capacitive pressure sensors from household materials. The other authors of this paper are Fhad Al-Modaf, Wedyan Babatain, and Nazek El-Atab from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

Research work as explained by the authors: Structural engineering plays an essential role in designing, improving, and optimizing an electromechanical system, instinctively affecting its performance. In this study, design optimization, finite element analysis, and experimental evaluation of capacitive pressure sensors were conducted. The air pressure sensing application was demonstrated to characterize different sensors, which include a combination of multiple rectangular cantilevers and diaphragms (square and circular-shaped). After the design improvement, we found that the square and circular diaphragms each with two trapezoidal cantilevers exhibited highest sensitivity to air pressure monitoring among the different investigated designs which combine the square and circular diaphragms with cantilevers. These designs were then selected for further analysis for acoustic pressure monitoring. The sensors were fabricated using the do-it-yourself technique with household materials such as post-it paper, posted tape, and foil. Our approach offers an alternative to the conventional cleanroom fabrication technique and uses easily available materials to fabricate affordable sensors. Therefore, this is the first step toward the development of democratized and sustainable electronic devices that are affordable and available to everyone on the internet.

Link to full paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9772763

The IEEE Sensors Journal is a biweekly peer-reviewed scientific journal, covering research on sensors. It is published by the IEEE Sensors Council.  According to the IEEE Sensors Council’s constitution – The fields of interest of the Council and its activities shall be the theory, design, fabrication, manufacturing and application of devices for sensing and transducing physical, chemical, and biological phenomena, with emphasis on the electronics and physics aspects of sensors and integrated sensor-actuators. The IEEE Sensors Journal focuses on the numerous sensor technologies spanned by the IEEE, and on emerging sensor technologies.