2024 Contest Now Accepting Entries!

Submit your best new product ideas for a chance at $25,000, other great prizes, and global recognition. If you already are registered, log in to access the entry form. Otherwise, click here to get started.

Help build a better tomorrow

Since Tech Briefs magazine launched the Create the Future Design contest in 2002 to recognize and reward engineering innovation, over 15,000 design ideas have been submitted by engineers, students, and entrepreneurs across six continents. You can also join the innovators who dared to dream big and build a better tomorrow by entering this year’s contest.

Read About Past Winners’ Success Stories

Over the past 20 years, many innovators have used the recognition afforded by the contest to advance the development and marketing of their technologies. We highlight some success stories of past winners who have brought their inventions to the marketplace.

Click here to read more

A ‘Create the Future’ Winner Featured on ‘Here’s an Idea’

Spinal cord injury affects 17,000 Americans and 700,000 people worldwide each year. A research team at NeuroPair, Inc. won the Grand Prize in the 2023 Create the Future Design Contest for a revolutionary approach to spinal cord repair. In this Here’s an Idea podcast episode, Dr. Johannes Dapprich, NeuroPair’s CEO and founder, discusses their groundbreaking approach that addresses a critical need in the medical field, offering a fast and minimally invasive solution to a long-standing problem.

Listen now

Thank you from our Sponsors

“At COMSOL, we are very excited to recognize innovators and their important work this year. We are grateful for the opportunity to support the Create the Future Design Contest, which is an excellent platform for designers to showcase their ideas and products in front of a worldwide audience. Best of luck to all participants!”

— Bernt Nilsson, Senior Vice President of Marketing, COMSOL, Inc.

“From our beginnings, Mouser has supported engineers, innovators and students. We are proud of our longstanding support for the Create the Future Design Contest and the many innovations it has inspired.”

— Kevin Hess, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Mouser Electronics

Follow Create the Future

Embedded Wear Sensor

Votes: 0
Views: 6965
Transportation

High temperature and high mechanical stress harsh environments can cause wear and erosion on exposed surfaces of critical components. Few sensing devices or methods are capable of performing intrinsic wear measurements, particularly in real-time and in situ. A fiber optic sensor has been developed that is capable of measuring real-time in situ regression, erosion and wear in a variety of materials under various conditions. The Regression, Erosion and Ablation Sensor Technology (REAST) was initially developed to perform real-time measurement of the regression of solid rocket propellants, but it has since been demonstrated in a wide range of applications, including: propulsion components, vehicle brake wear, metal on metal friction wear, and thermal-based insulator wear, with current testing for fluid-pipe erosion ongoing.

The operation of the fiber optic wear sensor is based on the transmission of light through an attenuating waveguide (e.g. optical fiber) as described mathematically by Beer’s law. The attenuation coefficient carries units of loss per unit length (e.g. dB/cm) and is an intrinsic property of the particular waveguide material. For high quality fiber optic glasses attenuation values are on order of a single dB/km. The attenuation of the fiber may be altered by a variety of methods to achieve values as high as 10 dB/mm.

The REAST sensor is formed using two optical fibers (waveguides) with differing attenuation coefficients. The fibers are embedded in a parent material and both it and the fibers are worn or eroded over time by the same physical process. In the simplest case, the thermal environment responsible for the wear mechanism also provides the light collected by the sensor. Typically the cross-sectional area of the fiber is small compared to the exposed surface of the host material and that the amplitude of the light collected from the wearing process is equal for the two fibers. This permits algebraic manipulation to solve the equations for length. The length refers to the fiber length, which will provide a measure of the host material wear rate if the two wear at the same rate. In practice, the tips of the two sensing fibers need to have differing attenuation coefficients only over the distance of expected wearing. The probes are typically formed from fusion splicing the attenuating regions upon a length of standard low-loss optical fiber. The low-loss fibers act as light conduits permitting the detector electronics to be located away from the wearing zone. Detection of the optical signal is done through photoelectric conversion within a photodiode. Silicon photodiodes have shown a sufficient response when the temperatures at the wearing layer surpass 350 oC. For cooler wear processes, two alternative options have been demonstrated. A detector sensitive to longer wavelengths (and thereby cooler blackbody temperatures) may be used for detection. Alternatively, a third fiber may be embedded into the parent material to backward propagate an exterior source of light (provided by a light emitting diode, laser, etc) that can be re-collected by the fibers comprising the sensor.

  • Awards

  • 2012 Top 100 Entries

Voting

Voting is closed!

  • ABOUT THE ENTRANT

  • Name:
    Valentin Korman
  • Type of entry:
    individual
  • Profession:
    Scientist
  • Number of times previously entering contest:
    never
  • Valentin's favorite design and analysis tools:
    Whiteboard and a large cup of coffee.
  • Valentin's hobbies and activities:
    Traveling
  • Valentin belongs to these online communities:
    Wouldn't join one that would have me as a member.
  • Valentin is inspired by:
    The simplicity of a good solution to a problem.
  • Patent status:
    patented