CASE STUDY | FUSION-H₂ – Breakthrough Hydrogen Flow Sensor
Revolutionizing hydrogen measurement with advanced ultrasonic technology built with future-proof lead-free piezomaterials.
Revolutionizing hydrogen measurement with advanced ultrasonic technology built with future-proof lead-free piezomaterials.
As new regulations phase out the use of lead in piezoelectric materials, Ionix is leading the way with an innovative, sustainable alternative. We’ve developed lead-free materials and sensors for extreme environments that operate across a wide temperature range without compromising sensitivity, providing a future-ready solution that maintains performance, resilience, and compatibility with existing systems. This breakthrough offers a sustainable path forward, ensuring compliance, continuity, and uncompromised performance in challenging environments.
Advanced asset integrity solutions, including HotSense probes and wireless CALIPERAY nodes, ensure safe operation of high-pressure steam lines in a power plant. These technologies offer precise, real-time monitoring at temperatures up to 600 °C, reducing inspection costs, enhancing safety, and minimizing operational disruptions. The system also detects wall loss and issues like leaking valves, providing confidence in asset performance without the need for frequent shutdowns.
Ionix HPZ enables gas flow metering at temperatures exceeding 400°C, utilising the same cabling technology, electronics, and software, significantly extending market reach for OEM manufacturers of flow systems. With plug-and-play compatibility for PZT, Ionix HPZ maintains the same physics and physical form as PZT, ensuring seamless integration. This allows OEMs to easily adopt Ionix HPZ without needing to alter their existing systems.
Integrating Ionix’s HotSense flare gas transducers provided frequent, consistent, and high-quality methane gas velocity data across a wide temperature range (-200 to +400 °C), enabling our partner to expand market penetration into chemical processing and refining. By using our HotSense ultrasonic technology, our partner achieved rapid market entry without significant in-house product development costs, launching a product within eight months. HotSense, a certified intrinsically safe ultrasonic platform, optimised system certification for safe, easy integration into existing electronics, and ensured worldwide operation, delivering accuracy better than ±1% with a high turn-down ratio.
Ionix’s flow meter OEM expands product offering to target high-value, low-competition, high-temperature flow metering applications with our HPZ piezoceramic-powered HotSense™ ultrasonic platform. This initiative includes the accelerated development and production of clamp-on ultrasonic transducers, reducing the product development cycle by threefold. A flow OEM partner outsourced production to Ionix to utilise our high-temperature assembly expertise, economies of scale, and adherence to ISO 9001 and ATEX/IECEx quality standards.
Ionix delivered a steam flow Lamb wave transducer operating at up to 220°C (15 barg), ensuring high accuracy and compact size. The technique accurately measures flow speed in up to 90% dry steam, saving their partner development time and costs, and accelerating market entry. This advanced technology enhances efficiency, reduces costs, and provides a competitive edge.
This technical note explores the suitability of Ionix’s HotSense platform for acoustic emission ( AE ) transducers for such applications, without the need for waveguides or IEPE electronics due to its high sensitivity across a wide temperature range, by the application of a standard pencil break test conducted at 350 °C. The outcomes demonstrate that the HotSense AE transducer exhibits outstanding sensitivity at this temperature, maintaining a performance level similar to that at room temperature.
A novel solution was sought by a leading high-performance automotive manufacturer to monitor the speed and position of the camshaft, crankshaft, gear box and other positions of interest up and down the drive train, in a package which would enable a step change in physical size requirements for a sensor. Explore this latest case study to find out more.
The ability to detect gas voids in cooling water lines was required by one of the largest electric power holding companies in the US, generating electricity from mixed sources, including 6 nuclear plants. Find out ho the Ionix solution helped.