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Sensor

Sensor is a device that detects and responds to some type of input from the physical environment. It measures characteristics like temperature, pressure, or flow and converts the input into an electrical or optical signal. Some examples of sensors are thermocouples, mercury thermometers, touch buttons, and light-dimming lamps. Sensors are used in many applications and fields beyond traditional uses, and both analog and digital sensors are widely employed in manufacturing, vehicles, medicine, aerospace, and robotics. A sensor's sensitivity indicates how much its output changes relative to changes in the measured input. Technological progress has allowed microsensors to be manufactured using MEMS technology at microscopic scales.

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21 views1 page

Sensor

Sensor is a device that detects and responds to some type of input from the physical environment. It measures characteristics like temperature, pressure, or flow and converts the input into an electrical or optical signal. Some examples of sensors are thermocouples, mercury thermometers, touch buttons, and light-dimming lamps. Sensors are used in many applications and fields beyond traditional uses, and both analog and digital sensors are widely employed in manufacturing, vehicles, medicine, aerospace, and robotics. A sensor's sensitivity indicates how much its output changes relative to changes in the measured input. Technological progress has allowed microsensors to be manufactured using MEMS technology at microscopic scales.

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Sensor

A sensor is a transducer whose purpose is to sense (that is, to detect) some characteristic of its
environs. It detects events or changes in quantities and provides a corresponding output, generally
as an electrical or optical signal; for example, a thermocouple converts temperature to an output
voltage. But a mercury-in-glass thermometer is also a sensor; it converts the measured temperature
into expansion and contraction of a liquid which can be read on a calibrated glass tube.
Sensors are used in everyday objects such as touch-sensitive elevator buttons (tactile sensor) and
lamps which dim or brighten by touching the base, besides innumerable applications of which most
people are never aware. With advances in micromachinery and easy-touse microcontroller platforms, the uses of sensors have expanded beyond the more traditional fields
of temperature, pressure or flow measurement,[1] for example into MARG sensors. Moreover, analog
sensors such as potentiometers and force-sensing resistors are still widely used. Applications
include manufacturing and machinery, airplanes and aerospace, cars, medicine and robotics.
A sensor's sensitivity indicates how much the sensor's output changes when the input quantity being
measured changes. For instance, if the mercury in a thermometer moves 1 cm when the
temperature changes by 1 C, the sensitivity is 1 cm/C (it is basically the slope Dy/Dx assuming a
linear characteristic). Some sensors can also have an impact on what they measure; for instance, a
room temperature thermometer inserted into a hot cup of liquid cools the liquid while the liquid heats
the thermometer. Sensors need to be designed to have a small effect on what is measured; making
the sensor smaller often improves this and may introduce other advantages. [citation needed] Technological
progress allows more and more sensors to be manufactured on a microscopic scale as
microsensors using MEMS technology. In most cases, a microsensor reaches a significantly higher
speed and sensitivity compared with macroscopic approaches.[

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