Development of a Signal Conditioning Circuit for Capacitive Displacement Sensors Using a Commercial Single Chip Solution

상용 Single Chip Solution을 이용한 정전용량형 변위 센서 신호 처리 모듈 개발

A signal conditioning circuit for capacitive sensors was developed using a commercial single chip solution. Since capacitive displacement sensors can achieve high resolution and linearity, they have been widely used as precision sensors within the range of several hundred micrometers. However, they inherently have a limitation in low frequency range and some nonlinearity characteristics and so a specially designed signal conditioning circuit is needed to handle these properties. Up to now, several companies already have succeeded in the development of the capacitive sensors system and they are commercially available in the market. In this research, to construct the signal processing circuits more easily and simply, we used a universal LVDT signal conditioner (AD698). Since the AD698 provides one chip solution for a basic signal processing including modulation and demodulation using various internal components, we can build the processing circuits successfully with minimal additional circuits: a compensation circuits for the drift caused by the bias current of OP amplifiers and a fine adjustment circuit for the elimination of nonlinearity. The signal processing circuits shows nonlinearity less than 0.05% in the comparison with a laser interferometer.