Thermally driven miniature electric field sensor

A thermally driven miniature electric field sensor (MEFS) has been designed, fabricated and tested. It is mainly comprised of shielding electrodes, bent beam thermal driver, positive and negative sense electrodes and drive pads etc, the shielding electrodes are driven by a cascaded bent beam thermal driver to periodically cover or expose the positive and negative sense electrodes. The thermally driven MEFS has the advantage of small size, light weight, low driving voltage, easy to integrate with circuits, low drive-signal cross talk noise etc. When activated with a square wave of +/- 2V amplitude at a frequency of 20 kHz the electric field strength resolution of the thermally driven MEFS can reach 105.8 V/m when the electric field strength is over 20000V/m, but its output sensitivity will decrease when the electric field strength goes down from 20000 V/m. We will improve the low electric field sensitivity in our future work.