A liquid-state high sensitive accelerometer based on a micro-scale liquid marble

In this paper, the dynamic behavior of a high sensitive liquid marble based accelerometer in the presence of the external acceleration field is investigated. The presented scheme for this study consists of a liquid marble placed on a curved surface bounded with another fixed surface above it. In order facilitate the marble displacement and therefore increase the accelerometer sensitivity, the marble is manipulated electrostatically by applying a DC voltage to the fixed top and bottom curved surfaces. The produced electrostatic force deforms the marble by opposing its weight, therefore causes the marble to get spherical form approximately. In the following, the nonlinear equation governing the motion of the liquid marble in the existence of the external acceleration is derived. To study the marble stationary behavior, the equation has been solved by utilizing the weighted residual method. It has been shown that by decreasing the contact zone area of the marble, the minimum external acceleration required to start the rolling motion of the liquid marble decreases. Investigating the frequency response of the accelerometer has also shown that for the external acceleration value lower than 0.04 g, the accelerometer shows linear stationary behavior.