Theoretical and experimental research on the in-plane comb-shaped capacitor for MEMS coriolis mass flow sensor

The Micro-Electro-Mechanical System Coriolis mass flow sensor uses a kind of in-plane comb-shaped capacitor to detect the vibration of tube containing the micro flow information. This paper takes the deflection of the micro tube caused by Coriolis force into account and models the in-plane comb-shaped capacitor of the sensor based on the electrostatic field method. Then the modulation and demodulation of the output capacitive signals are described in detail. The theoretical waveforms obtained by substituting the actual parameters into the models are consistent with the accepted conformal mapping method and match with the sampling signals, which attest the two models. According to the actual flow calibration experiment and the preliminary phase shift calculation, the measurement accuracy of the micro flow sensor reaches ±1.5 % with the repeatability of 0.75 % within 0–1.2 g/h flow range.