Ultra High-Precision Tunneling Tip Force Transducer

SatCon Technology Corporation will develop an ultra high precision force transducer based on the electron-tunneling effect. Precision force transducers have wide application in all manner of physical control systems as feedback sensors. In addition to being central to the operation of precision instruments such as gyros and accelerometers, they find wide application in active vibration control, active mounts, precision machining, and precision pointing systems. SatCon's design eliminates deficiencies of conventional transducers in these applications and will allow orders-of-magnitude improvement in performance over state-of-the-art devices. The design uses the electron-tunneling effect to make extremely sensitive position measurements which are used in conjunction with closed loop rebalance and estimation techniques to provide high accuracy force estimates. Benefits include low cost, wide bandwidth, high sensitivity, small envelope, and low power consumption. Phase I will include definition of the sensor interface electronics, and development of the processing algorithm for the signals. Detailed Phase I engineering designs will allow fabrication and testing of senors in Phase II, in addition to implementing the signal processing algorithm with a Digital Signal Processor.