 The company Piezocryst was honored in special festivities by the county of Steiermark in 2007 with an award in Nano Science and Nano Technology for its research & development activities on nano-functional, piezo-electric crystals.
The presented paper had achieved a large interest among the jury and expert public through the ongoing discussion about climate protection, due to the fact that a largely applicable basic technology was introduced, which is suitable for optimizing, monitoring and controlling combustion processes in power engines and gas turbines even under the highest temperatures.
In recent years, politicians, manufacturers and operators of gas turbines have made enormous efforts to reduce emissions and consumption values of aircraft engines or turbines for power generation. To this day, the so-called self-excited combustion instabilities are limiting further improvement. High temperature resistant pressure sensors offer the only way out by measuring the development of pressure in the combustion chamber and sending their signals to turbine regulation to finally operate close to optimal values. In the past, those high-performance sensors were not available or were only very limited because the necessary crystal layers only responded to the extreme requirements in a restrictive way.
The innovative material, a ceramic doped with antimony, offers the solution. This material is applied in nanometer-thin layers to the piezo-electric high-performance crystal (GaPO4) and achieves in this way all necessary properties, for example, the required friction value, the matched thermal expansion and the necessary resistance to temperature. The unit represents the core of a new sensor generation making the next step towards reducing consumption and emissions of modern turbines possible.
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