MEMS in the Aerospace Industry

Introduction

MEMS in the aerospace industry have been largely limited to sensing and diagnostic applications, both for flow control and for internal combustion monitoring and control. Other potential applications, which are still in the experimental stage, include controlling the boundary layer over an airplane wing using minute MEMS actuators.

Important Characteristics

MEMS technology possesses two characteristics which are very useful in aerospace applications: that of redundancy and rapid response times. Flow and combustion sensors both operate in very stressful environments which change dynamically over time. Therefore redundancy is important to prevent a complete system failure, and rapid response is important to be able to obtain high-resolution data.