Interface aids pressure stability and accuracy

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Nov 26, 2002

OmniSens is a novel electronic interface technology that provides digital accuracy and flexibility to pressure sensing instrumentation.

OmniSens is a novel electronic interface technology that provides digital accuracy and flexibility to pressure sensing instrumentation.

OmniSens incorporates a microcontroller and proprietary firmware to give unprecedented reliability, flexibility and value.

This new technology will be applied in several families of BEI Edcliff pressure sensors.

The OmniSens pressure electronics technology employs specialised algorithms to compensate for the mechanical nonlinearity and thermal sensitivity of the pressure die.

This method of software compensation results in a significant improvement in accuracy and performance over less sophisticated products that utilise look-up tables to condition signal output.

This compensation methodology enables products incorporating OmniSens to achieve 0.25% TEB (total error band) accuracies on standard configurations and 0.1% TEB accuracies on nonstandard requests.

A "rezero on command" function provides new flexibility in controlling zero-point drift.

Zero point drift can represent a significant issue in maintaining equipment calibration.

OmniSens re-zero on command provides the ability to rescale zero at startup or during predetermined maintenance intervals.

This results in reduced maintenance costs, increased equipment uptime, and higher sensor reliability.

OmniSens technology is easily packaged into standard, industrial, aviation and military pressure sensor packages making retrofit and replacement of other sensors simple.

The technology offers additional functions to control the characteristics of the sensor.

These advanced functions include the ability to "respan" the sensor either manually with the push of a button or electronically via firmware interface.

This allows the sensors full span output (FSO) to be adjusted to nonstandard pressure ranges.

Similarly the "reconfigure output on command" function enables users to reconfigure or scale the output signal of the sensor into a variety of units of measure.

Additionally media temperature output is available on request.

OmniSens products use a direct digital output which allows OEMs to eliminate the use of analogue to digital converters and comparators in control circuitry, reducing component count, design costs, equipment complexity and eliminating signal resolution loss due to conversion.

All of these benefits are provided for relatively the same cost of traditional analogue pressure sensors.

Models equipped with OmniSens technology can provide both digital and analogue signal outputs.

Digital outputs are available in TTL, RS232 and RS485 formats.

The digital output has standard UART (universal asynchronous receiver transmitter) duplex hardware features and provides dataflow in digital framed format.

The digital dataflow includes: the compensated pressure value; the compensated ambient temperature value; and the transducer's identity and specification values.

The analogue output of the OmniSens is synthesised by the microprocessor using the same compensation algorithm as the digital output to provide a highly accurate signal.

Analogue outputs include industry standard 4-20 mA and 1-5V output signal types.

In addition, the OmniSens product can be configured to provide custom analogue outputs to a customer's specification.

OmniSens technology is available in many different package configurations for applications in the following markets: medical equipment, process equipment, instrumentation, waste handling, pulp and paper, refrigeration and HVAC.