The design and performance of a miniaturized coplanar capacitive sensor is presented whose electrode arrays can also function as resistive microheaters for thermocapillary actuation of liquid films and droplets. Optimal compromise between large capacitive signal and high spatial resolution is obtained for electrode widths comparable to the liquid film thickness measured, in agreement with suppo...

A simple differential capacitive sensor is provided in this paper to measure the absolute positions of length measuring systems. By utilizing a shield window inside the differential capacitor, the measurement range and linearity range of the sensor can reach several millimeters. What is more interesting is that this differential capacitive sensor is only sensitive to one translational degree of...

Capacitive sensors in both touch and proximity varieties are becoming more common in many industrial and research applications. Each sensor requires one or more electrodes to create an electric field and measure changes thereof. The design and layout of those electrodes is crucial when designing applications and systems. It can influence range, detectable objects, or refresh rate. In the last y...

Capacitive sensing technology has become a promising solution to alleviating the hardware constraints of mobile interaction methods. However, little is known about users’ perception and satisfaction of the integrated capacitive touch interaction and conventional inputs on mobile devices. This study examined users’ performance of using a traditional 4-way navigation control enhanced with capacit...

Capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers ~CMUTs!, introduced about a decade ago, have been shown to be a good alternative to conventional piezoelectric transducers in various aspects, such as sensitivity, transduction efficiency, and bandwidth. In this paper, we discuss the principles of capacitive transducer operation that underlie these aspects. Many of the key features of capacitive u...

Differing from the structure of traditional parallel plate capacitive sensor a semi cylindrical capacitive sensor has been introduced in this present work to measure the soil moisture conveniently. Here, the numerical analysis method to evaluate the capacitance from the semi-cylindrical capacitive sensor is analyzed and discussed. The changes of capacitance with the variation of soil moisture o...

Touch Sensing This is the detection and measurement of a contact force at a defined point. A touch sensor can also be restricted to binary information, namely touch, and no touch. Tactile Sensing This is the detection and measurement of the spatial distribution of forces perpendicular to a predetermined sensory area, and the subsequent interpretation of the spatial information. A tactile-sensin...