Design, Development and Testing of a Semicircular Type Capacitive Angular Position Sensor

Sensors & Transducers Journal

(ISSN 1726- 5479)

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Vol. 129, Issue 6, June 2011, pp.16-23

Design, Development and Testing of a Semicircular Type Capacitive Angular Position Sensor

Nikhil GAURAV, Sagarika PAL

Department of Electrical Engineering, National Institute of Technical Teachers’ Training and Research, Kolkata [Under MHRD, Govt. of India],

Block-FC, Sector-III, Salt Lake City, Kolkata-700106, India

E-mail: nikhil091@gmail.com, spal922@yahoo.co.in

Received: 20 April 2011 /Accepted: 20 June 2011 /Published: 30 June 2011

Abstract: A low cost semicircular type capacitive angular position sensor has been designed, developed and tested. It is made of two semicircular parallel plates where one plate is fixed and another plate is connected with the rotor whose angular position is to be measured. When the angular position of the rotor changes with respect to the fixed plate, the overlapping area between the two plates of the capacitor is varied causing a change in capacitance value. Capacitance variation obtained due to the change in angular position is in the nano farad range. For signal conditioning, series R-L-C resonating circuit instead of conventional bridge circuit has been used to convert the sensor capacitance variation in to voltage. Experimental result shows that the capacitance for change in angular position 0º-180º increases linearly and for 180º-360º it decreases linearly. To get a linearly increasing response of same slope for the full scale of 0º-360º, a suitable linearising circuit has been designed, developed and tested. Sensor output along with the signal conditioning shows good linearity and repeatability.

Keywords: Semicircular plate, Angular position sensor, Series R-L-C resonating circuit, Signal conditioning, Linearising circuit

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