Soft sensor for measuring wind pressure

A soft double layered capacitive sensor is designed to measure pressure in an environmental wind flow. The top layer acts as an active capacitor to measure the magnitude of wind pressure and the other layer acts as a passive capacitor to differentiate between positive and negative pressures. The designed sensor is attached to a plate with a rotation angle relative to the wind direction and tested in a wind tunnel. We simultaneously record electrical signals from both the active and passive capacitors under different angles with a home-made circuit. For comparison, the wind pressure on the same plate is measured with the conventional pressure taps method. Excellent agreement between the two methods are obtained. A static experiment is conducted in parallel to calibrate the measured electrical signals to the wind pressure through a linear fit. The designed sensor is highly sensitive, has low cost, is non-destructive and easy to implement on a large surface area of an object, such as a bullet train, solar panels or a building. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.