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THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF SRI LANKA FACULTY OF ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY DIPLOMA OF TECHNOLOGY LEVEL 4 ACADEMIC YEAR 2012/2013 ASSIGNMENT

T #01 MEX4271 SENSORS & ACTUATORS

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Answer all questions. Write your registration number clearly on your answer script. Send your answer scripts under registered cover to the address given below or put it into the assignment box available at the Department of Mechanical Engineering (Block 17), Nawala. THE COURSE CO-ORDINATOR IN MEX4271 DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF SRI LANKA P.O. BOX 21, NAWALA NUGEGODA.

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Last date of submission: See the activity diary. No late submissions will be accepted.

Question 01: a) Giving examples for suitable auxiliary front-end elements, discuss the use of a force sensor to measure; i. Displacement ii. Velocity iii. Acceleration b) A rectilinear potentiometer was tested with its slider arm moving horizontally. It was found that at a speed of 1 cm/s, a driving force of 7x10-6 N was necessary to maintain the speed. At 10 cm/s, a force of 3x10-3 N was necessary. The slider weights 5 g, and the potentiometer stroke is 8 cm. if this potentiometer is used to measure the damped natural frequency of a simple mechanical oscillator of mass 10 kg, stiffness 10 N/m, and damping constant 2 N/ms-1, estimate the percentage error due to mechanical loading. Justify your procedure for the estimation of damping. c) Derive an expression for the sensitivity of a rotatory potentiometer as a function of displacement. Plot the corresponding curve in the non-dimensional form for the three load values given by RL/RC = 0.1, 1.0, and 10.0. Where does the maximum sensitivity occur? Verify your observation using the analytical expression.

Question 02: a) Level sensors are used in a wide variety of applications, including soft drink bottling, food packaging, and monitoring of storage vessels, mixing tanks, and pipelines. Consider the following types of level sensors, and briefly explain the principle of operation of each type in level sensing. Also what are the limitation of each type? i. ii. iii. iv. Capacitive sensors Inductive sensors Ultrasonic sensors Vibration sensors

b) The two output signals (vo1 and vo2) of the resolver are termed quadrature signals. Show how these quadrature signals could be demodulated to obtain the speed of rotation directly. c) Show that, up to first order, ambient effects are compensated in the ballast circuit if the series resistor Re and the strain gage resistance R have identical temperature coefficients of resistance. What happens if higher-order changes are included in the analysis? Question 03: a) Discuss and contrast the following terms: i. Measurement accuracy ii. Instrument accuracy iii. Measurement error iv. Precision Also, for an analog sensor-transducer unit of your choice, identify and discuss various sources of errors and ways to minimize or account for their influence. b) Compare and contrast the principle of operation of the DC tachometer and the AC tachometer (both permanent-magnet and induction types). What are the advantages disadvantages of these two types of tachometers? c) Applications of piezoelectric sensors are numerous: pushbutton devices and switches, pressure and force sensing, robotic tactile sensing, accelerometers, excitation sensing in dynamic testing, respiration sensing in medical diagnostics and graphics input devices for computers. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of piezoelectric sensors. What is cross-sensitivity of a sensor? Indicate how the anisotropy of piezoelectric crystals (i.e. charge sensitivity quite large along one particular axis) is useful in reducing cross sensitivity problems in a piezoelectric sensor.

Question 04: a) For an ideal design of an incremental encoder, obtain an equation relating the parameters d (diameter of encoder disk), w (number of windows per unit diameter of disk), r (word size of angle measurements). Assume that quadrature signals are available. If r = 12 and w = 1,000 windows per in, determine a suitable disk diameter. b) By using high-precision techniques to imprint window tracks on the code disk, it is possible to attain the window density of 1,000 windows/in. of diameter. Consider a 3,000 window disk, suppose that step-up gearing is used to improve resolution and the gear ratio is 10. If the word size of the output buffer is 16 bits, examine the displacement resolution of the device. c) Suppose that each plate of a moir fringe deformation sensor has a line pitch of 0.01 mm. A tensile load is applied to one plate in the direction perpendicular to the lines. Five moir fringes are observed in 10 cm of the moir image under tension. What is the strain in the plate?

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