News

Steve Carter and Bud Coleman attended the Turbomachinery and Pump Symposium from September 13th through 15th in Houston, TX. Attendees included design, operations, and maintenance personnel working with rotating equipment for the production of fluid/electrical power and transfer of material in the oil & gas, petrochemical, power generation, aerospace, chemical, and water industries. Kulite has a relatively small presence in the industrial pump and compressor market, but the potential appears to be much larger with new applications being brought in on a regular basis. The visitors to the Kulite booth indicated the rotating equipment business is in a new period of growth including more challenging measurement requirements for which Kulite offers a wide range of solutions.

Customers were interested in the sensing technology to measure pump pressures on a new robotic paint sprayer, high-temperature hazardous area chemical processes, gas combustor acoustics, and high-speed compressor discharge pressure. All of these applications had been seen as high-risk efforts until the Kulite solution was presented. There were also several companies looking to improve their current process measurements and monitoring capability with the identification of advanced pressure measurement technology. Several companies are now considering Kulite transducers for inclusion in new products they are developing.

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.