Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Droogendijk, H
• Casas, J
• Steinmann, T
• Krijnen, G J M

Titel

Performance assessment of bio-inspired systems: flow sensing MEMS hairs

Ist Teil von

• Bioinspiration & biomimetics, 2014-12, Vol.10 (1), p.016001-016001

Ort / Verlag

England: IOP Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Despite vigorous growth in biomimetic design, the performance of man-made devices relative to their natural templates is still seldom quantified, a procedure which would however significantly increase the rigour of the biomimetic approach. We applied the ubiquitous engineering concept of a figure of merit (FoM) to MEMS flow sensors inspired by cricket filiform hairs. A well known mechanical model of a hair is refined and tailored to this task. Five criteria of varying importance in the biological and engineering fields are computed: responsivity, power transfer, power efficiency, response time and detection threshold. We selected the metrics response time and detection threshold for building the FoM to capture the performance in a single number. Crickets outperform actual MEMS on all criteria for a large range of flow frequencies. Our approach enables us to propose several improvements for MEMS hair-sensor design.