A DOE analysis on the robustness of miniaturized silicon stress sensors response

none1noThe present work deals with the investigation of performance of differently shaped piezoresistive sensors in hydrogenated amorphous silicon. Such sensors, applied on a glass specimen by a deposition technique, have a very small size: dimensions of sensing areas never exceed 1 mm. Sensors were statically calibrated under pure bending moment: a linear relationship was observed between outputs and specimen strains and a gain factor was calculated to relate them. Moreover, the strict analogy between each sensor and a full Wheatstone bridge was observed. The purpose of this paper was to discuss the robustness of response, potentially dependent of the length of connections to the acquisition device. For each configuration, tests were performed with short (150 mm) and long cables (3 m) at four load levels, with three replications. Finally data were processed in a two-factor ANOVA showing that no influence is due to cables length at the 5% significance level.mixedG. OlmiG. Olm