A signal conditioning and data acquisition system for micro/nano displacement sensor

The conventional method to measure the micro/nano scale displacement is using the principle of optical, chemical, or capacitive. Different with the previous methods, we designed a mechanical amplification structure based on flexure hinges to amplify the micro/nano scale displacement and using strain gauges to convert the deformation into electrical signals. However, after the original displacement is amplified by amplification mechanism, the output electrical signal is still very weak. Measure the weak electrical signal effectively or not, will determine whether the sensor can achieve nanometer resolution. A signal conditioning and data acquisition system including hardware and software implementation which can effectively measure such weak signal is presented in this paper. To verify the effectiveness of the whole system, some correlative experiments have been made. The experiment results show that the sensor with this set of system can detect the displacement of the PZT actuator in micro/nano scale. In addition, the sensor we proposed has the characteristic of large range, high resolution, small size and low cost than other micro/nano displacement sensor.