Temperature Sensing for Oil, Gas, and Structural Analysis

About this technology

Overview

The X-33 was intended to pave the way for a full-scale, commercially developed reusable launch vehicle to be built for NASA by the Lockheed Martin Corporation after the turn of the century. Due to technical problems with the vehicle's composite liquid hydrogen tanks, the X-33 program was cancelled in February 2001. Science developed for the vehicle prototype helped toward creating a small fiber-optic-based temperature sensor that has found widespread uses. In 1996, Systems and Processes Engineering Corporation (SPEC), of Austin, Texas, undertook a NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract with Langley Research Center to develop the compact and lightweight digital thermal sensing (DTS) system for monitoring the cryogenic tanks on the X-33 prototype aircraft. That technology, along with a processor developed by SPEC for Goddard Space Flight Center, was space-qualified and integrated into several NASA missions. SPEC formed an ancillary organization, SensorTran, Inc., to continue work developing the DTS technology for a variety of commercial and industrial applications. By the year 2000, SensorTran was employing the DTS technology around the world in the oil and gas industry, the electrical power industry, in processing plants, and to test structural integrity of large structures. Now in its second generation, the commercially available device, billed as the SensorTran 5100, is an industry leader because of its performance, ruggedness, and cost-effectiveness. The device measures temperature along an optical fiber by monitoring the amplitude of backscatter from a laser pulse through the fiber, with temperature profiles accurate to half a degree Celsius along full kilometers of optical fiber.