Development of a silicon carbide MEMS capacitive pressure sensor operating at 500 °C

In this paper, we present development of MEMS capacitive pressure sensor based silicon carbide (3C-SiC) materials. The sensor is made up of four elements: a 3C-SiC diaphragm, silicon substrate, a reliable stainless steel (SS) o-ring and (SS) vacuum clamper as the package. The designed are inherent simplicity and ruggedness of this physical configuration that acceptably performed for extreme environment applications such as in gas turbine engine. This study reported a reliability testing of a prototype package MEMS capacitive pressure sensor verified up to 500 °C through high temperature lab testing. At 500 °C, the reliability test results show that the sensitivity of 0.826 pF/MPa is achieved. Experimentally, sensor nonlinearity of 0.61 % is found with hysteresis of 3.13 %. The maximum temperature coefficient of output change is 0.073 %/°C measured at 5 MPa.