Gyroscope, accelerometer, barometer, magnetic field sensor, brightness sensor, proximity sensor… Smartphone chips are of interest to scientists for low-cost experiments and measurements.
In the hangar of the Saint-Cyr-l’École wind tunnel (Yvelines), around sixty smartphones are suspended as if on a clothesline. When the giant fans start up, this unusual garland begins to wave in the wind, while very faithfully recording its own movement. Acceleration, angular speed and orientation, all data that will make it possible to very precisely measure the passage of artificial wind gusts, their intensity, their size and their speed thanks to the internal sensors of each of the smartphones.
“The trick here is that we use the phone as both an experiment and a measuring instrument. “, explains Stéphane Perrard, researcher at the École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris (ESPCI). The experiment could have been done with metal plates and video capture, but it would have been much more laborious. The team of physicist engineers therefore opted for the smartphone as a measuring tool, and they are not the first.
Scientists from all walks of life, seduced by the good performance of our phones’ sensors, are starting to use them for applications ranging from medicine to civil engineering to education. The low cost, quality and versatility of our little pocket-sized technological gems could well earn them a place of choice in the ranking of scientific instruments in the coming years.
Miniaturized and all-in-one, the smartphone is ideal for field measurements. This aspect is what convinced Stéphane Perrard and his colleague Antonin Eddi to take the plunge and buy 65 smartphones to make various measurements, ranging from geophysics to aerodynamics. In addition to their aerodynamics experiments in the wind tunnel, the research duo flirts with geosciences during field campaigns on the Canadian ice floe[…]
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