Flexible planar electromagnetic sensor array fabricated with printing electronic technology

Although flexible planar electromagnetic sensor array has many advantages such as good conformability, strong adaptability and high efficiency, there is a conflict between their sensitivity and spatial resolution. The relationship between sensitivity and structural parameters of planar coil are analyzed in this paper, and a novel printing electronic technology (PET) is employed to fabricate the flexible planar electromagnetic sensor array. When the spatial resolution of two planar sensors is the same, experiments indicate that the sensitivity of flexible planar sensor fabricated with PET is 10 times of that fabricated with traditional flexible printed circuit (FPC) technology, which can improve the detection ability to micro defects significantly. The flexible planar electromagnetic sensor array fabricated with this method can be applied to inspect components with irregular surface.