Simulation Of Flexible Capacitive Strain Sensor For Food Packaging Applications

• Main Author: Salleh, Muhammad Safwan
• Format: Monograph
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Sains Malaysia 2022
• Subjects: T Technology; TJ Mechanical engineering and machinery
• Online Access: http://eprints.usm.my/55593/1/Simulation%20Of%20Flexible%20Capacitive%20Strain%20Sensor%20For%20Food%20Packaging%20Applications_Muhammad%20Safwan%20Salleh.pdf; http://eprints.usm.my/55593/

Due to the variety of uses for strain sensors, there is a growing demand for flexible, affordable, and low-power devices for strain. This paper presents the simulation of the flexible Interdigitated Capacitive (IDC) strain sensor for food packaging applications. In the food packaging application, the development of chemical and biosensors overshadow the capability of the strain sensor in detecting damages in the food packaging application. Thus, a simple and common flexible capacitive strain sensor is designed to fulfill this specific requirement. To ascertain its competency in the said application, the performance of the flexible IDC strain sensor is accessed by using Ansys Workbench, specifically Ansys Static Structural and Ansys Electric.In the Ansys Static Structural, the flexible IDC strain sensor performance is simulated for large and small strain variations from 0GPa to 200GPa to determine its sensitivity. The changing deformation of the flexible IDC strain sensor is tranferred to Ansys Electric analysis in order to obtain the nominal capacitance and the changing capacitance of the sensor model due to the strain experienced of the sensor model. In the Electric analysis, only a modest voltage of 0.02V is provided to the interdigitated electrodes in the simulation so that the capacitor can function accordingly. The simulation findings are further contrasted with actual observations using a developed flexible IDC capacitive strain sensor that uses Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as the dielectric and substrate and Silver Nano-Particles (AgNPs) as interdigitated electrodes which has been developed for the same purpose of this study. The sensor model exhibits a linearity (R2 = 0.9957) which is a common trend of a common flexible IDC strain sensor. The simulated and experimental nominal capacitance achieved by the sensor model using Ansys was 0.997pF and 4.37pF respectively. This results in percentage difference between experimental nominal capacitance and simulated nominal capacitance of 368.78%. When using the capacitance value from calculation, the nominal capacitance obtained is 1.010 pF in which results in percentage difference of -3.73%.