Unlike humans, with our mere five senses, mechanical systems can be rigged to sense just about anything, at any threshold, often in environments people couldn’t endure. NASA uses sensors to monitor conditions ranging from the interior of a jet engine to the vacuum of space, and they measure anything from wind currents to trace gases.
When off-the-shelf sensors aren’t available to meet NASA’s needs, the agency makes new ones. A host of new sensors for detecting chemicals, wind direction, pressure, temperature, and more can also serve everyday needs in unexpected ways. All they need is a person or company with a challenge to meet.
Extreme Wind
Airplanes can be damaged when powerful winds blow through. Weather events such as gusts, microbursts, or thunderstorms put everything in their path at risk, so an early warning system is important. Just five to 10 minutes can be enough time to implement emergency procedures for wind turbines and help airports prevent harm to aircraft and passengers. The Wind Event Warning System is a high-energy Doppler lidar sensor that measures approaching changes of wind. It can alert engineers to the resulting change in power output of a wind farm and allow service providers to switch to an alternative energy source to accommodate the power draw in the electrical grid.
Harsh Hot Environments
Real-time pressure measurements corrected for the impact of temperature make it possible to obtain accurate data in places difficult to monitor, such as aircraft engines, nuclear power plants, and aerospace applications. A new silicon carbide pressure and temperature sensor chip developed by NASA can be placed directly on an engine, close to the combustion source. It supports real-time data analysis in high-temperature, high-power, and high-radiation environments. This kind of monitoring improves performance and extends the service lifetime of commercial and military aircraft, automotive engines, and power plants.
Tracking Gas
Nitric oxide (NO) detection has a wide application for environmental monitoring and industrial process control. NO is a highly unstable, reactive gaseous molecule, making its detection challenging, especially at low concentrations and in high-humidity environments. This new, cutting-edge chemiresistive sensor can selectively detect NO in real time using a small, handheld design that’s easy to operate and uses little power. The swift, highly accurate readings are ideal for environmental monitoring of outdoor pollutants, manufacturing emissions, and hazardous industrial sites. It’s equally viable for medical diagnostics and scientific research such as oceanographic studies.
The Ideal Mix
Using established methodologies and commercial components, NASA’s new optical sensor can precisely measure the concentration of a liquid solution. The device measures light scattering to determine the solution concentration, eliminating the long-term problem of voltage drift in sensors that rely on electrical conductivity. Originally designed for the International Space Station, this sensor can easily be adapted for a number of industries. A few of these are fluid management systems, food and beverage processing, pharmaceutical production, medical devices, and wastewater processing.
Taking Inventory
Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is widely used in the commercial sector for large-quantity inventory, tracking items on pallets and in boxes. But keeping track of things that are too small to tag can be a serious problem for pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and retail supply management. A new NASA sensor can fill that gap. This system uses RFID circuits placed inside a container to measure bulk quantities. By monitoring the level of the contents, a manager can track usage and easily adjust inventory. This tagging system could be used for difficult-to-measure products such as bulk grains, liquids, mechanical parts (nuts, bolts, and washers), and small electronic components.
Smaller, Better, Cheaper
A new smaller, more robust RFID antenna developed by NASA can easily replace larger existing technology, resulting in better performance at a lower cost. The Hyper-Distributed RFID Antenna (HYDRA) system is a multiplexing RFID antenna system that improves range while reducing complexity. By extending sensing range of RFID readers and improving location accuracy, this versatile sensor offers adaptable functionality to meet a variety of needs. These might include helping farmers determine health conditions of produce and aiding medical staff with managing medical devices and supplies, or even tracking patients. This technology also tracks retail inventory and shipment check-in and automates ordering.
To learn more about these and other sensor technologies available for licensing, visit the Technology Transfer program Patent Portfolio.
NASA’s Technology Transfer program ensures that innovations developed for exploration and discovery are available to the public, maximizing the benefit to the nation. They often become solutions to different challenges that have the potential to benefit life on Earth.
