Towards high resolution monitoring of water flow velocity using flat flexible thin mm-sized resistance-typed sensor film (MRSF)

By Xu, Zhiheng; Fan, Yingzheng; Wang, Tianbao; Huang, Yuankai; Dehkordy, Farzaneh MahmoodPoor; Dai, Zheqin; Xia, Lingling; Dong, Qiuchen; Bagtzoglou, Amvrossios; McCutcheon, Jeffrey; Lei, Yu; Li, Baikun
Published in Water Research X 2019

Abstract

Novel flexible thin mm-sized resistance-typed sensor film (MRSF) fabricated using ink-jet printing technology (IPT) was developed in this study to monitor water flow rate in pipelines in real time in situ mode. The mechanism of MRSF is that the mm-sized interdigitated electrodes made by printing silver nanoparticles on an elastic polyimide film bend under different flow rates, leading to variation of the resistance of the sensor at different degrees of curvature. Continuous flow tests showed that MRSF possessed a high accuracy (0.2 m/s) and excellent sensitivity (0.1447/ms?1). A model of sensor resistance and flow velocity was established to unfold the correlation between the fundamentals of fluid mechanics and the mechanic flexibility of sensor materials. An analytical model yielded a high coefficient of determination (R2 > 0.93) for the relationship between the resistance increment of the MRSF and the square of the flow velocity at the velocity range of 0.25

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