| The ability to monitor in real time the thermo-mechanical responses of tools, equipment, and structural components has been very appealing to the aerospace, automotive, drilling, and manufacturing industries. So far, the challenge has been to instrument the tools, equipment, or structural components with a number of sensors in an economical way and also protect the sensors from the environment which the tools, etc. are exposed to.; In this work, a sequence of manufacturing processes that can be used to build thin-film temperature and strain sensors on internal surfaces of metallic structures is proposed and demonstrated. The use of thin-film techniques allows the parallel fabrication of sensor arrays, whereas a layered manufacturing scheme permits the creation of sensors on the internal surfaces of metallic parts and their subsequent embedding. Thin-film sensors are deposited on an aluminum oxide film, which is grown on a stainless steel substrate. The oxide is deposited by reactive sputtering. The sensors are sputter-deposited from alloy targets, shaped via micromachining and partially covered with a passivation layer of aluminum oxide. The thin-film structure is then covered by two protective electroplated layers of copper and nickel for protection during the deposition of the embedding layers. Embedding is accomplished by using a high-power infrared laser to melt an invar powder bed on top of the protective layers. Among the issues that emerged during the definition of the fabrication sequence were: the long-term stability of reactive deposition, the presence of pinholes in the dielectric layers, the optimal combination of materials and thickness of the protective layers, the bonding at the various interfaces, and the heat input and residual stresses resulting from the high-temperature embedding process.; Finally, a finite element model was constructed in order to simulate the high-temperature embedding process. The heat transfer analysis performed on the model provides the temperature profiles of all nodes and can be used as a tool for the optimization of the protective layer thickness. Its results can also be used for a stress analysis of the multilayered structure. |
