PROGRESSES ON MICROMACHINED FLOW SENSORS BASED ON MEMS TECHNOLOGIES

Flow measurement concerns an important measuring parameter in industryprocess and scientific research. Along with the research and rapiddevelopment of micro Electro-Mechanical sysmtes (MEMS) in recent years,the trend of development of the flow rate sensor in the traditionalindustry and fluid mechanics research is high integrantion level,microminiaturization, high degree of accuracy and high reliability.And, along with research and rapid development of the life sciences,comes the need of new type micromachined flow sensors in microfluid,biology, medicine, helth and food scientific research. Micromachinedflow sensors have become a major focus of MEMS. This paper brieflyreviews the technological development of MEMS, and introduces theprinciple and classification of micromachined flow sensors based on MEMStechnologies. Emphases are put on the detailed summarization andevaluation of the production technology and application characteristicsof micromachined flow sensors such as hotwire, heat transfer,differential pressure, lift force, fluid oscillatory. Coriolis andbionic micromachined flow sensors. A summary of calibration method ofmicromachined flow sensors is given in this paper. And, this paperspecially covers the hot hotwire, heat transfer, differential pressure,optics micromachined flow sensors developed in China. In the end, thethree stages of development of micromachined flow sensors based on MEMStechnologies, the trend of the micromachined flow sensors based on MEMStechnologies in future are discussed.