Transducers Trends - Part 1 of 3 by John Holt

As application engineers, we frequently have the opportunity of seeing customers equipment and facilities and we are often asked whether this type of microphone or accelerometer works for a certain application. So we thought that it may be interesting for the audience of the blog to have a quick summary of the latest trends in transducer technology. We walked through the expo hall at the Noise and Vibration conference in Traverse City this past May and here is what we came up with:

TEDS: Most of the major transducer manufactures offer TEDS transducers, but they are not yet widely used in industry. As new data acquisition hardware that supports TEDS begins to replace the legacy hardware, expect to see more TEDS transducers in use.

Wireless: A few transducer manufacturers we visited in the exposition area are currently working on wireless transducers. All agreed that the largest barrier preventing implementation is finding a lightweight easily packaged power source. The second concern with wireless involved data security, although this seems to be resolved using some type of frequency varying signal. Most of the manufacturers didn't feel concerned with bandwidth or channel count issues when asked.

Constant Sensitivity Microphones : An interesting new idea discovered during a conversation with a microphone manufacturer was the ability to adjust the gain of the internal circuit in their IEPE microphones before shipment to insure that all of their IEPE transducers have a nominal gain. For example we could expect the IEPE transducers to have gain values of 50 mV/EU as opposed to 48.125 mV/EU.

Laser Vibro-meters : It was interesting to see laser vibrometer with multi-channel output with the ability to scan a measurement surface, as well as a laser vibro-meter that didn't require the user to focus the laser beam a nice usability feature.

Sound Intensity Transducers: We were introduced to the new technology of particle velocity transducers and the ability of these transducers to measure real-time acoustic intensity. Most use cases involved using the transducers to create acoustic maps used for source localization.