Optimization Design Of Ice Thickness Detection Capacitance Sensor

This topic is a basic research which is started in Journal of Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology (2011NCL009), it mainly explores on application of capacitive sensor in detecting the thickness of ice layer. At higher latitudes, when the temperature drops, the frozen rivers bring great influence on the production of human life. Ice detection plays a very important role in automatic hydrological detection and disaster early warning system. Through continuous monitoring of river ice thickness variation can realize the detection of the whole river ice. Ice layer thickness sensor plays a very key role in the development of ice thickness detecting system.This paper summarizes the development on ice thickness detection, and to do further research on ice thickness sensor and its detection system in recent years. It makes a detailed discussion on the principle and the physical properties of ice thickness measurement of capacitance method, and proposes a new measurement method of ice thickness measurement sensor. The new type of capacitance sensor simulated by the ANSYS software, which reveals the mechanism of capacitive sensing method for measuring the thickness of the ice, with the simulation on a variety of capacitance sensors, the capacitor plate size and sensor is optimization designed. In addition, based on the theoretical and experiments analysis, to do the freezing experiment with a variety of actual capacitance sensors, which obtained a lot of valuable data. On one hand, it has verified the feasibility of the capacitance method for measuring ice thickness, on the other hand, it provides the data to support the ice interface criterion. In the course of actual measurement, there is a dilemma that the capacitance values are too small to measure, so the paper compares the micro capacitance measurement chips that sold on the market, then using the AC AM company’s latest Pcap01chip solutions. With this method, it has reduced the detection system volume and greatly improved the accuracy of the system. For the application of the engineering background of North River and the internet of things application background, an ice thickness measurement system has been designed, including power supply system used in the field, display circuit, GPRS circuit, the android platform client development. In the detecting system of ice thickness measurement, the ice interface identification is a difficult issue, the paper summarizes discriminant methods and studies on new ways to find the ice interface, then use BP neural network to identify the ice interface, which is tested good under Matlab platform.The research results of this paper realize the continuous detection of the changes in the whole process of ice, the system has the advantages of simple structure, stable and reliable, and can be widely used in rivers, lakes and the surface of the glacier and it also support continuous measurement. It is applicable to the network detection of ice development under the full coverage, has important theoretical reference and practical value in disaster prevention and mitigation, ice warning and other fields.