The Application of IPMC Material Sensors in Collecting Flow Rates of Products

Abstract

With the rapid development of the economy and society, the demand for e-commerce products such as ocean speed sensors, heart rate sensors, and fingerprint recognition sensors is constantly increasing. This study selected an ion-exchange polymer metal composite (IPMC) with a certain potential for flow rate sensor applications to design experiments to test the performance of the flow rate sensor constructed with this material. As the density of the medium decreased, the deformation at the tip of the IPMC material decreased, and the pressure difference on the flow field cross-section increased. The densities of seawater and alcohol were 1072 kg/m³ and 783 kg/m³ respectively, with corresponding tip deformation and pressure difference of 0.20 mm and 0.14 mm, as well as 327 Pa and 86 Pa, respectively. As the temperature of seawater increased, the viscosity value of the medium decreased, and there was no significant change in the deformation and pressure difference at the tip of the corresponding IPMC. It indicates that within the range of changes in seawater viscosity, temperature has little effect on the deformation of IPMC, or in other words, IPMC has strong temperature adaptability under these conditions. When other conditions are the same, the larger the flow rate, the greater the deformation of IPMC. The experimental results demonstrate that under conditions of high length, width, and flow velocity, the IPMC flow velocity sensor designed in this study has high measurement accuracy. The research results contribute to the design of new IPMC flow rate sensors for e-commerce products.