A Reliable High Temperature Transducer for Engine Vibration Measurement: A discussion of the design problems involved in the production of transducers suitable for vibration monitoring in the difficult environment of modern jet engines

EARLY in 1963, a project was initiated in co‐operation with an European airline with a purpose of starting development work for a new transducer for engine vibration monitoring. The low reliability of former pickups motivated this development work. In the course of the development, modern engine design requirements raised the need for the high temperature stability of these transducers. The development work was, therefore, based on the necessity to produce a vibration transducer with extreme high reliability, good interchangeability tolerance and useable up to approximately 600 deg. C. in practical flight operation. With regard to these requirements, a suitable technical approach seemed to be the use of the piezoelectric transducer technique, because seismic acceleration pickups working on the piezoelectric principle do not use moving parts, whereas displacement and velocity pickups, used so far, have at least one moving part, i.e. the inertial mass. Also the requirement for high temperature stability could be met by using modern crystal technology. The following chapters will expound some mechanical and crystallographic considerations in connection with such transducers, and furthermore describe some devices which are now being used in practical flight operation. Today, the concept of a piezoelectric, high temperature accelerometer with 2‐pole signal output has been commonly adopted in industrial production of transducers for airborne vibration monitoring.