Summary of Sensirion SDP sensors measure pressure but even a flow
The article discusses Sensirion's SDP differential pressure sensors, ideal for HVAC and airflow applications requiring precise pressure or flow regulation. These sensors operate by detecting pressure-induced airflow through a miniature heating element and temperature sensors, providing accurate, stable measurements with built-in temperature compensation and linearization. The SDP600 series offers versatile models for pressure, mass flow, and low power consumption, all capable of bidirectional measurement. More affordable SDP500 series sensors suit unidirectional flow but with less guaranteed accuracy. Outputs are read via I2C and can be converted to various units, with optional altitude compensation.
Parts used in the Sensirion SDP Differential Pressure Sensor project:
- Sensirion SDP differential pressure sensor (e.g., SDP600/610, SDP601/611, SDP606/616)
- Miniature heating element (integrated within SDP sensor)
- Built-in temperature sensors (integrated within SDP sensor)
- I2C communication interface
- Microcontroller or processing unit for data reading and conversion
- Power source (e.g., battery for low-power models)
Ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC), or any other applications, where a pressure or a flow of air (gas) is essential, can be precisely regulated only if we know a real pressure/ flow conditions. Monitoring of fans functionality, status of filters, …, even for this purpose are very suitable differential pressure sensors from Swiss company Sensirion with an excellent accuracy and long-term stability.
As SDP sensors are differential, they have 2 nozzles. The base of these sensors is a miniature heating element and two temperature sensors. Difference of pressures will cause a small air flow through a component and it will cause a temperature difference in these built-in sensors. Temperature difference is directly depending on the amount (weight) of air flowing through a sensor and it naturally depends just on a pressure difference. A great advantage against membrane pressure sensors is a long-term high accuracy even at measuring of small pressure and maintaining of accuracy of a “zero point”.
sensors wouldn´t be accurate. That´s why SDP sensors have a built-in temperature compensation and linearization, thus an output of a sensor is directly a value usable for further processing. Resolution of sensors is very high and is user selectable in a range of 9-16 bits. Resulting binary value read-out through I2C interface can be divided by a constant shown in a tab. 2.1 on page 3 of the SDP6xxv1.7 datasheet and we´ll get a resulting value in desired units (Pa, bar, inch).
Universal and price-attractive series is the SDP600 (6xx) series, in which we´ll find types optimized for measurement of pressure (SDP 600/610), mass flow (SDP601/611) and types with a minimal power consumption suitable even for battery-operated devices (SDP606/616). All these types are able to measure “bidirectionally” i.e. positive and even negative values. For applications, where we know, that a pressure difference will be always positive (flow by only one direction), it´s possible to use more price-affordable types SDP 500/510 (in fact even these types measure bidirectionally, but their accuracy is not guaranteed in this range). For the most of applications no additional compensation is necessary, only it can be necessary to multiply a resulting value by a constant for an altitude compensation shown in a table 5.4 on page 6 in the datasheet.
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