EngeniusMicro: Sensors for Extreme Environments

This is a guest blog by Michael Whitley, VP of Engineering at EngeniusMicro.

EngeniusMicro leverages experience in MEMS, microfabrication, and electronic packaging technology to develop cutting-edge sensors for physically and thermally demanding environments. We have developed ceramic sensors to measure pressure, temperature, heat-flux, and strain with operational ranges up to 3000 F.

We have two efforts currently underway with the US Army. The first project we refer to has IMPACT, the full name is High Velocity Impacts for Structural Health Monitoring. We have a sensor that we call the FSAT (Frequency Steerable Acoustic Transducer). It's a lot of words, but basically it is a peel and stick thin sensor that sends out and analyzes sound waves in a material to determine the 'health' of the material. The Army wants to integrate it into the underside of vehicles to assess damage after an IED blast. We see non-military applications in areas like oil pipeline monitoring, bridge monitoring and process equipment monitoring.

The second project is to develop wireless, batteryless corrosion sensors. Corrosion is usually indirectly measured by monitoring temperature and humidity then performing visual inspections. We have developed a sensor that is composed of hundreds of iron strips that corrode as normal metal would. We can read it out wirelessly and power it using energy harvesting.

On the commercial side we are developing a laser swimming pool mapping device for a vinyl liner manufacturer (check out the video here).

We use the Octopart Excel add-in to painlessly review pricing and availablity for our BOMs across multiple vendors. It also allows us to comparison shop components. In the past we would upload BOMs to individual distributors and work through sourcing issues on each distributors website, with Octopart we are able to consolidate that work to one Excel workbook