Company expands piezoelectric production
A
Kistler Instruments product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Jun 23, 2008
Kistler uses the Czochralsky process, which involves a number of materials being deposited onto a seed crystal pulled slowly out of a melt to extract a single crystal bar.
To meet the demand for its piezoelectric sensors, Kistler has commissioned a new crystal growing facility.
This is the third facility since the company began producing the artificially grown calcium gallogermanate crystal ten years ago.
PiezoStar crystals have superior performance characteristics to natural quartz and are used to produce high-precision sensors for pressure, force, torque and acceleration.
In 1880, French physicists, Pierre and Jacques Curie, discovered that natural quartz would produce an electric charge when subjected to mechanical stress but this property was not used widely until 1950 when Walter P Kistler invented the charge amplifier that made industrial applications possible.
Variations in the characteristics of naturally occurring quartz limited its suitability for accurate measurements and it was not until Kistler began growing synthetic crystals in 1958 that high-precision piezoelectric sensors became available for practical applications.
Kistler uses the Czochralsky process, which involves a number of materials being deposited onto a seed crystal pulled slowly out of a melt to extract a single crystal bar.
PiezoStar single crystal bars are generally 1.5 to 2kg in weight, 150mm long and 60mm in diameter.
The crystals are then sliced in appropriate directions to produce pressure and shear-sensitive piezoelectric elements to form the heart of sensors measuring pressure, force, torque and acceleration.
Kistler PiezoStar sensors are used in a wide range of applications requiring accuracy and reliability, especially in difficult, high-temperature environments, including monitoring cylinder pressure in internal combustion engines and mould cavity pressure in plastics injection moulding.
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