Fabrication and testing of a Hall effect based pressure sensor

Purpose This paper aims to present the fabrication and testing of a pressure sensor integrated with Hall effect sensors and permanent magnets arranged in two configurations to measure pressure in the range of 0–1 bar. The sensor is fabricated using stainless steel (SS) and can be used in high-temperature and highly corrosive environments. The fabricated sensor is of low cost, self-packaged and the differential arrangement helps in compensating for any ambient temperature variations. Design/methodology/approach The sensor deflects of a circular diaphragm with a simple rigid mechanical structure to convert the applied pressure to a Hall voltage output. Two sensor designs are proposed with a single pair of Hall sensors and magnets and a differential configuration with two Hall sensors and magnets. Two sensor designs are designed, fabricated and tested for their input–output characteristics and the results are compared. Findings The fabricated sensors are calibrated for 25 cycles of ascending and descending pressure in steps of 0.1 bar. Various static characteristics like nonlinearity, hysteresis and % error are estimated for both the sensor designs and compared with the existing Hall effect based pressure sensors. The differential arrangement design was found to have better characteristics as compared to the other design from the experimental data. Originality/value This paper focuses on fabricating and testing a novel differential Hall effect based pressure sensor. The differential arrangement of the sensor aids in the compensation of ambient temperature variations and the use of SS enables the sensor in high-temperature and highly corrosive applications. The proposed sensor is low cost, simple and self-packaged, and found to have high repeatability and good linearity compared to other similar Hall effect based pressure sensors available in the literature.