Performance Analysis of a New Non-contact, Potentiometric Angle Sensor

Abstract

Resistive, potentiometric type of transducers find lots of applications in angle sensing due to their simple operation and linear outputs. However, they have a major disadvantage that their wiper undergoes wear and tear in course of time. So, a floating wiper is the solution to this problem. Hence in one of the previous works, a new non-contact potentiometric transducer was developed by the authors by modifying a conventional, contact-type resistive transducer. As the wiper is now floating with respect to its fixed terminals, an air gap capacitance got included in the equivalent circuit of this transducer and therefore, to get linear results from it, a novel signal conditioning circuit was developed by the authors. The principle of operation of this circuit has been discussed in a follow-on paper by the authors. This paper is a continuation of these previous works and it reports the performance analysis conducted on this sensor for a few features.