On the Feasibility of a New Approach for Developing a Piezoresistive 3D Stress Sensing Rosette

Monitoring of stresses and strains in a structure is important to detect problems during the design or the service cycle of the structure. Piezoresistive sensing rosettes are considered a reliable method for stress and strain monitoring. While few efforts have been focused towards developing a 3D stress/strain sensing rosette, most of the currently developed piezoresistive rosettes extract only in-plane stress/strain components. In this paper, a new approach for building a stress sensing rosette capable of extracting the six stress components and the temperature is presented and its feasibility is verified both analytically and experimentally. The current approach is based on varying the doping concentration of the sensing elements and utilizing the unique behavior of the shear piezoresistive coefficient (π44) in n-Si.