Posted by Mike on November 2nd, 2007 in MEMS, sensor

Currently, there is a lot of effort going into improving preventative maintenance on costly machines to increase their lifetime. A big part of this effort is making sensor systems that perform well in these areas, which are typically hot, greasy, and all around brutal on electromechanical systems. This new type of MEMS temperature sensor was just created to help the Air Force predict engine bearing failure, and its strong points are the tiny size, the ability to stand up to 300 degrees Celsius, and the ability to measure temperature of the bearings directly (instead of taking the temperature of the hydraulic fluid, like all other systems.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a Boeing engineer, while I was developing a separate, but similar, MEMS flow sensor. When he mentioned putting it into the Joint Strike Fighter to do fluid and temperature sensing, I asked if it should advise the pilot if there was something that was going to happen to the vehicle. He said “Hell, no! We want them out on the edge, they don’t have time to think about the jet! They need to focus strictly on the enemy. We simply want to tell the crew chief when to pull the part, BEFORE it fails.”

So the moral of the story is: Although sensing systems are practically invisible to the end user, behind the scenes they are a crucial and ever growing part of our everyday devices and machines. As long as sensors keep getting cheaper, smaller, and more effective, there’s will be plenty of ways to improve gadgets by adding sensors.

http://www.physorg.com/news112979687.html