2023-05-31 12:45:44
For many important activities in industrial sectors such as aerospace, energy or transport, sensors are required that must measure and monitor numerous parameters while they are subjected to an extreme environment, with very high temperatures and pressures. The work of these sensors is vital to guarantee the safety of people and the integrity of the devices.
In the petrochemical industry, for example, pipeline pressures must be monitored in climates ranging from the very hot of the desert to the frigid of the arctic. Nuclear reactors need measurements of all kinds and operate at temperatures of hundreds of degrees Celsius. Deep geothermal wells also need a lot of vigilance and boast temperatures of up to 600 degrees Celsius.
The difficulty, if not the impossibility, of placing sensors in very hot spots has been hindering the surveillance work of many of these systems.
Now, a team consisting of, among others, Jae-Hyun Ryou and Nam-In Kim, from the University of Houston in the United States, has developed a new sensor that in laboratory tests has shown to work well at temperatures of up to 900 degrees. Celsius, which is a typical temperature for lava recently spewed out by volcanoes.
Now that the researchers have successfully demonstrated the good potential of their high-temperature piezoelectric sensors, they are going to continue testing them in harsh real-world conditions.
Sensor of the new type, held by a member of the research and development team. (Image: University of Houston)
Ryou and his colleagues plan to use the sensor in various adverse scenarios. For example, in nuclear power plants to expose them to a shower of neutrons, and in hydrogen storage systems to subject them to very high pressures. The new sensors, in addition to withstanding heat, can work in atmospheres at very high pressures and exposed to bursts of neutrons.
The flexibility of the new sensors offers additional advantages that will make them ideal for future applications in the form of wearable technology for personal health monitoring devices that can be worn by the person as clothing, and for use in soft robotics that require an ability to very high precision detection.
The researchers hope that their sensor will become commercially viable in the near future, when it has been sufficiently refined and validated.
Ryou and his colleagues discuss the technical details of their new technology in the academic journal Advanced Functional Materials, under the title “Piezoelectric Sensors Operating at Very High Temperatures and in Extreme Environments Made of Flexible Ultrawide-Bandgap Single-Crystalline AlN Thin Films.” (Fountain: NCYT de Amazings)
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