Concepedia

High-Temperature Piezoelectric Sensing

Xiaoning Jiang, Kyungrim Kim, Shujun Zhang, Joseph Johnson, Giovanni Salazar

Sensors · 2013 · 421 citations · 85 references

Open access

TL;DR

Piezoelectric sensing is increasingly sought for high‑temperature aerospace, automotive, power plant, and material‑processing applications due to its low cost, compact size, and simple signal conditioning compared with other high‑temperature techniques. The paper provides an overview of high‑temperature piezoelectric sensing techniques and outlines current challenges and future directions. The authors review various high‑temperature piezoelectric single crystals, electrode materials, and sensor types—including accelerometers, SAW sensors, ultrasound transducers, acoustic‑emission sensors, gas sensors, and pressure sensors—highlighting their advantages, disadvantages, and performance up to 1,250 °C. The review identifies key challenges such as material degradation, signal integrity, and packaging, and proposes future research directions to enhance high‑temperature piezoelectric sensing.

Abstract

Piezoelectric sensing is of increasing interest for high-temperature applications in aerospace, automotive, power plants and material processing due to its low cost, compact sensor size and simple signal conditioning, in comparison with other high-temperature sensing techniques. This paper presented an overview of high-temperature piezoelectric sensing techniques. Firstly, different types of high-temperature piezoelectric single crystals, electrode materials, and their pros and cons are discussed. Secondly, recent work on high-temperature piezoelectric sensors including accelerometer, surface acoustic wave sensor, ultrasound transducer, acoustic emission sensor, gas sensor, and pressure sensor for temperatures up to 1,250 °C were reviewed. Finally, discussions of existing challenges and future work for high-temperature piezoelectric sensing are presented.