A Bio-Inspired Flow Sensor

Accurate measurement of the turbulent flow is an important step toward understanding the mechanisms of many unknown phenomena. Turbulence generally can not be easily measured without significantly disturbing the original flow conditions. This paper introduces the efforts that aim to develop a bio-inspired sensor for monitoring turbulent flow. The sensor will consist of an array of micro-pillars or nano-pillars. Piezoelectric elements serve as transductors, which provides a key sensing element in the construction of micro-pillar. A prototype design was fabricated for the micropillar. The performance of sensing principle by this micropillar was evaluated and was found to be sensitive. The micropillar will be further refined into sensing arrays for real time sensing of flow turbulence.