The growing use of ultrasonic sensor now demands millimetre range of operation
with high accuracy. Ultrasonic sensor uses sound waves for its ranging and the speed of sound is
influenced by a number of environmental parameters. The objective of this paper is to discuss
on the list of environmental parameters which have the major influence on the accuracy of the
ultrasonic sensor and also to formulate a simplified mathematical equation to calculate instantaneous
speed of sound by taking these influencing parameters into consideration. Comparison
result shows the derived simplified equation for calculating instantaneous speed of sound gives
maximum percentage error of 0.33 for the temperature range of 0—50 ◦C. Here we also focus
on the steps to calibrate ultrasonic sensor for millimetres range of operation.
© 2016 Published by Elsevier GmbH. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license