A nonlinear resonant mass sensor with enhanced sensitivity and resolution incorporating compressed bistable beam

A new piezoelectric actuated nonlinear mass sensor is proposed by using the snap-through phenomenon of a compressed bistable beam to enhance the sensitivity and resolution, which can be used to weigh or detect threshold mass by tracking the bifurcation frequency shift. According to the nonlinear finite element modeling technique, the nonlinear dynamic response of the combined nonlinear structure is numerically calculated, which shows that the bifurcation point can be accurately identified by the sharp and great amplitude change regardless of the damping effect, thus providing an effective way for tracking the bifurcation frequency. Hence, the nonlinear sensitivity depicted by the bifurcation frequency shift per unit mass can reach 3.3 times the sensitivity of linear mass sensors having the same size. Also, as a mass switch, the response amplitude jumps sharply when the added mass is greater than or equal to the threshold value, which is dependent on the excitation frequency. Meanwhile, the influences of the beam compression and excitation voltage on the sensitivity and minimum detectable mass were obtained for sensor optimization. For concept validation, a macro-sized nonlinear mass sensor was fabricated with the geometric size of 58.0 mm long and 4.0 mm wide, and the experimental results show that the sensitivity is around 575.0 Hz/g compared with the simulated sensitivity of 542.0 Hz/g. For a mass switch, the minimum threshold mass is 0.2 mg. The fair agreement between the simulation and experiments adequately validated the proposed nonlinear bistable mass sensor. Published by AIP Publishing.