Micromachined Thermocouple for Rapid Detection of Ultrahigh Heat Flux at High Temperature

This article presents a novel high temperature heat flux (HTHF) sensor based on micromachined thermocouple (MTC) to meet the needs of transient high heat flux detection in ultrahigh temperature environments, such as fire research, high-power pulsed lasers testing, and aerospace engineering. The targeted design, fabrication, and package of an MTC-based HTHF sensor with excellent heat dissipation capacity are proposed, and relevant experiments were conducted in two aspects. First, powerful laser tube-based tests at ambient temperature show that such a sensor can detect a heat flux high to 10.8 MW/m
²
with an extremely fast response; its response time, in this case, is 1.9 ms. And then, turbine engine test pipe based tests at high temperature reveal that the sensor with water cooling could survive at 1200 °C for at least 100 s. Compared to conventional heat flux sensors, it is more sensitive to transient heat flux changes and has a faster response speed. Such satisfactory performance makes the sensor extremely competitive in ultrahigh heat flux detection in extremely harsh environments.