Advancements in Biomimetic Hair Flow-Sensor Arrays

In this paper we present the latest developments in the design, fabrication and application of single and arrays of biomimetic hair flow-sensors towards high-resolution air-flow imaging. Redesigning the electrode system of the hair sensor (using SOI wafer technology) has led to improve the detection limit down to 1 mm/s air-flow amplitude using 3 kHz measurement bandwidth. SOI technology facilitates the fabrication of wafer-scale arrays, which can be interrogated individually using a smart array interfacing scheme e.g Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM). The combination of high-sensitive hair sensors and FDM opens possibilities for high spatial-resolution air-flow measurements. A chip-scale single hairs array is used to demonstrate flow-pattern measurements by reconstructing the field of a dipole projected at its position. The separation distance between array elements is determined using the reconstructed dipole field