Product News: Noncontact Gap Sensors Systems for Aircraft Applications

(Capacitec: Ayer, MA) -- Capacitec Inc., a designer and manufacturer of noncontact capacitive displacement, gap, and parallelism sensing technologies for scientific and industrial customers, has announced the successful application of noncontact gap sensor systems within aircraft assembly, slot die coating, and aircraft engine and power generation testing applications.

• During commercial and military aircraft assembly, the Capacitec Gapman system is used as a “portable electronic feeler gauge,” to determine appropriate dimensions of metal shims used in wing assembly and other metal-to-composite surfaces. Implementation has reduced required shimming time by five times over the previous method, which utilized feeler gauges.

• During thin coating operations, a Capacitec Slot Die Coater Gap measurement system is used to measure slot die gaps to an accuracy of 0.5 µm, while maintaining gap uniformity to <0.25 µm across a two to three-meter length in the production of labels, special films, wall panels, batteries, and foam-based products.

• In aircraft engine and power generation turbine manufacturing, Capacitec offers “contact wand” sensing systems, used to measure gaps between fan blades and engine cowling. The major system advantage is that it does not require grounding of the target and the hand-held wand, and electronics can easily access any of the fan blade gaps without the need to rotate the blades.

Since the 1970s, Capacitec high temperature noncontact sensing technology has been in use in North America, Europe, and Japan to solve the most demanding applications, measuring displacement of up to 0.4 in. (10 mm), within extreme temperature environments where resolution of one micron or better is a requirement. For more information about these and other noncontact sensing systems available from Capacitec, please visit www.capacitec.com [1].