It’s a sensor game

From Sierra’s beginning over 40 years ago, founder Dr. John G. Olin was driven by the vision of supplying industrial customers with the world’s most accurate mass flow meter. And, he knew it was a ‘sensor’ game.

With a background – and Ph.D. – in mechanical engineering and specialised in fluid mechanics and heat transfer, Olin was a driven innovator and founded Sierra Instruments Inc. in 1973 with the purpose of offering industrial grade thermal mass flow meters to solve industry’s need for rugged, reliable flow meters based on the thermal principle.

The development of an industrialised metal-sheathed sensor in the early 1980s was Sierra’s first big step, but was only the beginning for Dr. Olin, who saw ‘thermal mass flow’ as his life’s work. Many successful innovations followed, including a major breakthrough in 1999 with the introduction of Sierra’s patented no-drift DrySense™ mass velocity sensor. With this development, Sierra engineers recognised they were on the cusp of realising Dr. Olin’s vision.

Now a second-generation business, today Sierra has nearly 200 employees, facilities in five countries, and agents in no less than 53 countries. The company has grown substantially under the leadership of Dr. Olin’s son, Matthew J. Olin. President and CEO since 2003, he imbues the company’s focus on building a great company, not stock price, and creating innovative products that continually change the way people think about industrial companies.

Sierra has pioneered with a number of firsts throughout its history, starting in the early 1980s with the first mass flow meter (MFM) and mass flow controller (MFC) with a cleanable sensor – the SideTrak® – and more recently the first digital MFC with multi-gas capability (Dial-A-Gas®) with unique local pilot module display interface – SmartTrak® – and the first four-sensor thermal mass air/ gas flow meter design in the shape of the QuadraTherm 640i/780i.

Recent product releases include the SmartTrak® 140 Ultra-Low ΔP for semiconductor applications, the SmartTrak® 100 High Pressure for pilot plants, a cryogenic version of the InnovaMass® 240 multivariable mass vortex flow meter, and the SmartVO™ Control Valves range. With this in mind, we asked Sierra’s CEO about markets and innovation.

“Sierra is responding to market/industry demands by continually creating effective and innovative products that meet the needs in those markets,” Olin says. “Specifically over the past few years we have brought to the market the world’s first QuadraTherm® 640i/780i thermal dispersion mass flow meter. The first of its kind with patented four-sensor technology, it offers unparalleled +/-0.5% accuracy plus our latest release, new gas mixing software that allows customers in oil and gas and other industries to do in-the-field-gascomposition changes/creation without loss of accuracy.”

Olin refers to Sierra’s new qMix gas mixing software which, for the first time, allows oil and gas engineers to field adjust their gas composition on thermal mass flow meters in the field for flare, Vapour Recovery Units (VRU’s), and storage vessels without sending the meter back to the factory for recalibration. The new software package is included with every QuadraTherm 640i/780i thermal mass flow meter on a beta trial basis and is a unique feature of Sierra’s Smart Interface Program (SIP) software, unlike anything available on the market for industrial mass flow meters.

The ability to create custom gases or gas mixtures to compensate for gas compositional changes in the field without accuracy loss means oil or gas engineers can easily meet US EPA Directive 40 CFR Part 98 for shale gas upstream production operations since they can use qMix when the gas composition changes in the pipe, or when moving the meter to another location with a different gas composition.

This is potentially a game-changing solution in flow control; traditionally, thermal mass flow meters are calibrated using the exact gas mixture they are intended to measure, or a surrogate mixture with very similar properties. With the qMix-enabled QuadraTherm, end-users are able to field adjust and maintain flow meter accuracy if the gas composition changes – avoiding costly recalibration. Sierra is, therefore, hailing the QuadraTherm 640i/780i with qMix as the ‘perfect solution’ for challenging shale gas upstream production applications.

With the energy sector under continual – and rapid – evolution today, and of increasing significance to the industrial gas and equipment community, the launch of Sierra’s qMix software exemplifies its founder’s quest to develop flow control solutions for industry’s ever-changing needs.