News

JP Hilton, Scott Goodman, and Brendan Wilder attended the 2022 TETS Symposium. TETS brings together around 900 participants from the Turbine Engine industry including OEMs, academics, and government employees. TETS is a relatively small show but has a high concentration of decision-makers and researchers. Kulite engineers met with potential new clients and existing customers including one who stated how happy they are with their BME-88/89 products and miniatures. Overall, our clients relayed to us that Kulite is the first and best name in pressure transducers.

At the Symposium, many papers were presented regarding varieties of “pressure gain combustion” including rotating detonation engines (RDEs). RDEs are a challenging measurement environment for a variety of reasons – they require high speed (>5 kHz) high temperature (>500°C) pressure measurements that would accurately reproduce the time-domain pressure pulses. At the Kulite booth, discussions included device designs for reaching measurement goals, high-temperature products and making RDE measurements. Commonly discussed parts included water-cooled units (WCTV, EWCTV), water-cooled jackets (WCJ), high-temperature units (XTEH-10L, XHTL), and remote measurement systems (DWPP-040, KSIT-040-190). Also, 5th-wire measurements were discussed, and multiple contacts found this approach desirable both for temperature accuracy and because they wanted to reduce their overall instrumentation count by replacing temperature transducers with 5th-wire outputs.

Kulite recently hosted United Launch Alliance, Boeing and NASA for an intensive audit and review of the manufacturing and test documentation for some of our pressure transducers that are installed for use on the Artemis II Space Mission. The three day in-depth review was a great success. Kulite provides FLIGHT CRITICAL transducers specifically used for the pressurization systems for the measurement of liquid oxygen and  liquid hydrogen. The ULA,  Boeing and  NASA team met with many Kulite employees that work on these transducers to thank them for their dedication and hard work toward the success of this world changing mission. 

Artemis II is the first-ever crewed test flight of the Orion Spacecraft. This is scheduled to launch on the SLS rocket in 2023. We are proud to be a partner on this mission to return humans to the moon for the first time since 1972. 

Scott Goodman, Senior Design Engineer and Steve Carter, Technical Director Instrumentation and Applications, represented Kulite at our booth at the AIAA Aviation Forum in Chicago, IL. The AIAA Aviation charter offers a venue for interaction between researchers, system developers, product support personnel, managers, and business developers from industry, government, and academia. Kulite was the only manufacturer in attendance of commercially-available pressure transducers. Approximately eighty academic and industry contacts visited the Kulite booth for extended discussions during the 3-day conference to present their research and to discuss their unusual and/or challenging requirements including which transducer designs would provide the best measurement capability.

Kulite welcomed five 2022 summer interns to our Leonia, New Jersey campus. These students are from Fordham University, Rutgers University, and Binghamton University and their projects include technical development of apparatuses for various test and measurement applications with respect to pressure. They are being mentored by JP Hilton, Brendan Wilder, Martin Sanzari, Sr., and Maharshi Joshi.

Kulite has formed a new special projects and development group. This group will be headed by JP Hilton, Vice President of Product Development and Joe VanDeWeert who was promoted to Senior Technical Director of Digital Development.

The new group will be responsible for pushing the state of the art in both pressure measurement technology (frequency response, temperature capability, and robustness) and also electronics/software development (higher accuracy, better thermal compensation, easier to produce and use). JP’s team will primarily focus on mechanical and material science development and Joe’s will focus on electronics and software. Both teams will work together to make sure Kulite has the tools needed to develop these new products and solve all of our customer’s measurement needs.