HVAC Pressure Sensors
One Sensor. Many Pressure Ranges.
HV Series – Differential Pressure Sensors
Industry’s highest performing and most flexible differential pressure sensors, based on NimbleSense™ architecture, for HVAC and air handling applications.
- Multi-Range™ capabilities: Factory calibrated and performance optimized for up to 8 distinct pressure ranges within a single device to simplify design and reduce sensor manufacturing inventory by up to 8x.
- Improve system performance with 0.05% accuracy down to 25 Pa FSS limited only by the industry’s lowest noise floor offering.
- Positionally insensitive for handheld systems achieving a up to a 10x improvement relative to competing offerings.
- Easy to implement digital interface coupled with the first fully optimized differential pressure sensor for HVAC and air handling systems.
VAV
Handheld
HS Series – Differential Pressure Transmitters
DPT Sub-system Platform: Most advanced, highest performing and most easily configurable pressure sensing sub-system for DPT and other air handling systems.
- Product Definition: Fully define product features in minutes, enabling a single HW implementation to support a full featured family of DPT systems.
- Engineering Implementation: Leveraging our turnkey HW/SW solution, accelerates delivery of the family of production systems.
- Manufacturing: HW systems are programmed at the end of the production cycle to add product personality and features. This simplifies the manufacturing process to lower cycle times and inventory requirements of DPT systems and sensors.
Air Handling Applications
Recommended Devices: HS Series HS160, HS120, HS110 and HS210
- Easy to configure sub-system accelerates definition, development and production of DPT systems with Multi-Range™ Capabilities
- Industry’s best overall performance: TEB, Accuracy, and Noise floor
- Device chosen based on FSS range requirements
Recommended Devices: HV210
- Industry leading accuracy <0.1% of range selected
- Supports applications down to 0.1” H2O (25 Pa) FSS
- Very high turndown ratios supported by < 1.75 Pa TEB
Recommended Devices: HV110, HV160
- Industry leading accuracy <0.1% of range selected
- Very high turndown ratios supported by < 4 Pa TEB
- Industry’s leading long-term stability support
Recommended Devices: HV210
- Industry leading accuracy <0.1% of range selected
- Outstanding positional insensitivity support
- Multi-range from 10” H2O (2500 Pa) down to 0.1” H2O (25 Pa)
Recommended Devices: HV210, HV160, HV110
- Industry leading long-term stability support
- Multi-range from 60” H2O (15K Pa) down to 0.1” H2O (25 Pa)
- Device chosen based on FSS range requirements
Superior Technology for HVAC
Recommended NimbleSense Features for HVAC Applications
One device can support up to 8 different pressure ranges from 25 Pa (0.1” H2O) to 15k Pa (60” H2O) across the HV Series, and each pressure range is factory calibrated and optimized ensuring no degradation in a total error band, accuracy or stability regardless of the range selected. This eliminates the complexity and headaches of working with multiple sensors.
Instead of having to research, purchase and design-in multiple parts, a single Multi-Range part simplifies both the design and manufacturing of a product. Designing in the same part throughout your designs is much more efficient than having to select multiple components. When you design in each of the Superior Sensor differential pressure sensors, the setting of the pressure is done via a single software command. It’s that simple. Add the fact that there is only one product to inventory, and your manufacturing team will also appreciate the value of Multi-Range!
Benefits of Multi-Range Technology include:
- Design flexibility with ability to ‘tweak’ pressure range throughout development cycle
- Simplified product design with one sensor replacing up to 8 different sensors
- Ability to quickly develop product variants at different pressure ranges without changing hardware design
- Greater economies of scale by purchasing larger quantities of the same product
- Reduced manufacturing complexity and costs due to simplified calibration of sensors
- Up to 8x reduction in sensor inventory costs and product obsolescence
- Allows manufacturers to build fewer product variants, significantly lowering working capital requirements and inventory
Closed Loop Control adds capabilities to set and maintain flow rates via pressure management by directly controlling motors, valves and actuators. Superior Sensors offers the option to have this capability integrated into the sensor in order to more effectively set and maintain flow rates by directly controlling motors, valves and actuators to maintain flow rate targets.
The integrated Closed Loop Control design significantly reduces loop delays in the electronic circuit by up to 100x. This integrated solution also eliminates the need to design and implement a complex control loop system, resulting in more efficient, more reliable and less costly products. Closed Loop Control is of extreme value in medical respiratory devices such as ventilators and CPAP, as well as in air quality measurement products.
The figure below shows a block diagram of an implementation of the Superior Sensor Closed Loop Control for an air quality application. In order to effectively measure the air quality, we require maintaining a constant/known airflow through the viewing window. The differential pressure across the venturi directly measures the flow into this viewing window. The system sets a target pressure level across the venturi and the differential pressure sensor automatically increases or decreases the drive to the pump to maintain the targeted differential pressure, ensuring a constant airflow into the viewing window. This is accomplished with the NimbleSense closed loop circuit used in combination with the company’s proprietary noise filtering, resulting in greater than 100x reduction in loop delay.
Benefits of the integrated Closed Loop Control include:
- Greatly reduce loop delays to improve accuracy and responsiveness of your product
- Improve the reliability of your product by eliminating discrete parts
- Reduce your overall system costs
- Minimize system power and heat
- Simplify your product design
- Speed your time to market
Superior Sensor’s advanced digital filter is a multi-order filter that utilizes advanced filtering capabilities on the front-end of the sub-system to eliminate critical noise created by fans, blowers or other dry air/gas sources prior to reaching the pressure sensing sub-system. The NimbleSense advanced filtering capability removes sensor induced mechanical noise before it becomes an error signal that can adversely impact overall system performance. In customer deployments where our sensor replaced a competing component, we have seen greater than 10x reduction in sensor induced noise, thus greatly improving the SNR of the sensor output. In very low pressure systems, the improvement is even more significant.
Incorporating both standard and optional digital filters, this feature provides significantly better noise reduction and eliminates the need to design an external filtering system, resulting in more efficient, more reliable and less costly products. Our advanced digital filtering is optimized for each application to ensure mixed sampling noise is kept well below the noise floor. By removing the mechanical noise, we maximize overall system performance.
The example below is of a 4th order FIR filter customized to block pump noise above 50 Hz, which has noise of equal magnitude as the signal of interest. The lower graphs show the resulting impact of the advanced digital filtering.
Benefits of the advanced digital filtering technology include:
- Greatly reduced system noise levels by 10x or more, especially important in very low pressure applications. For noise prone systems, an improvement of 100x to 1000x is not unreasonable.
- Eliminate noise sources such as fans and blowers before they reach the pressure sensing sub-system.
- Simplify product design with an integrated approach.
- Speed time to market by not having to design an external filtering system.
As all of Superior’s pressure sensors have an extremely low noise floor, theoretically power line interference can be ‘heard’ when taking measurements. The integrated 50Hz/60Hz notch filter eliminates this noise so you maintain the advantage of having such a low noise floor pressure sensor without any external interference. With the notch filter seamlessly integrated in the differential pressure sensor module, the sensor blocks out the interference caused by these frequencies before it reaches the user application. Further, as the notch filter is internal to the sensor module, it eliminates the need for an engineer to design and implement an external notch filter. This feature removes an external notch filter, so the overall system is more efficient, more reliable and less costly.
Benefits of the integrated 50/60Hz Notch Filter include:
- Eliminate the noise from the power grid and AC devices before it reaches the sensing element
- Simplify product design with an integrated approach
- Speed time to market by not having to design and/or implement an external notch filter
- Lower overall system cost as an external notch filter is no longer required