A magnet-based vibrating wire sensor: design and simulation
Frédéric Bourquin, Michel Joly · Smart Materials and Structures · 2004
Vibrating strings help in measuring relative displacements in a mechanical system. Since the ground natural frequency of a string increases when it is stretched, monitoring the ground frequency yields the current length of the string. Therefore a wire able to vibrate between two anchor points of a system acts as a relative displacement sensor. Excitation is usually achieved by means of an active coil, which is very close to the vibrating iron wire. Vibrating wire sensors (VWS) based on this excitation may prove obtrusive and one is limited to wires of small length. The new VWS takes advantage of distributed passive magnets, which force the wire to vibrate mainly in its fundamental mode. The sensor proves scalable and much less obtrusive when fully embedded, since it can be made flat and very flexible. On the basis of a simplified electromechanical modelling of the measurement process, a suitable distribution of magnets is proposed, which is proved numerically and experimentally to make the measurement robust with respect to mechanical uncertainties. Moreover, numerical simulations suggest measuring not the voltage in the vibrating wire but the current in an auxiliary circuit.