« Back to Facilities Management News Home
Oct. 20, 2014 — The Honeywell company City Technology, the World’s leading manufacturer of gas sensors for industrial safety, this month launched the new 4OxLL, a long-life oxygen sensor designed to work for the whole life of the average portable gas detector.
Oxygen sensors working in safety-critical industrial applications must deliver high-performance detection and fast speeds of response, since lives and assets depend on consistent, accurate readings. Many plants feature harsh process conditions and environmental extremes and transients that can compromise stability, so a robust design with a quick recovery time is essential.
In today’s competitive world, cost reduction is a key factor in sensor selection. Many plants use thousands of oxygen sensors in their portable gas detector fleets, so ongoing maintenance and sensor replacement costs can soon mount up. Field failures can also have an adverse cost impact, resulting in unnecessary process downtime and safety risks. The industry ideal is a sensor that can work as long and hard as the instrument itself - in all conditions it might face.
City Technology’s new 4OxLL oxygen sensor sets the standard for safety compliance, delivering unbeatable value through a variety of class-leading features. With an operational life of five years - the average life of a portable instrument used in safety-critical industrial applications – 4OxLL provides a fast speed of response with less than 5 percent drift over life. Its innovative design and unsurpassed performance in environmental extremes and transient conditions, also minimizes nuisance alarms and the occurrence of field failures. 4OxLL dramatically reduces ongoing maintenance by removing sensor replacement costs. A plant operating 200 portable gas detectors can save 200 hours of maintenance labor ($20,000 in total, based on $100/hr labor), over five years, compared with a standard two-year life model. (Calculation based on an estimated 30 minutes sensor replacement time.) The combination of its performance and cost saving potential makes 4OxLL ideally suited to diverse industrial safety-critical monitoring applications.
John Warburton, strategic marketing manager for City Technology, said, "Using a high stability solution like 4OxLL enhances safety and provides attractive operational efficiencies. We used advanced component design, Finite Element Method Modelling (FEM), and Six Sigma to create a robust and highly reliable design. FEM allowed us to simulate the distribution of oxygen within the sensor under a range of environmental conditions and predict key performance parameters such as sensor output, start-up characteristics, and transient response, thus enabling us to design the most robust sensor possible.
"4OxLL features 'oxygen pump technology,' which unlike conventional galvanic sensors, has no consumable anode (the life-limiting element in an oxygen sensor), This delivers the long life performance our customers and end-users require."
