City Technology Celebrates 25 years of Sensoric Specialist Gas Sensing Innovation

Honeywell company, City Technology, a World leading manufacturer of gas sensors, is this year celebrating the 25th anniversary of its specialist gas sensing range, Sensoric.

City Technology’s Sensoric range, manufactured in Bonn, Germany, provides the most comprehensive specialist gas sensing portfolio available on the market. More than 180,000 sensors per annum are manufactured at the facility – detecting toxic and exotic gases such as ammonia, hydrides, fluorine, chlorine and ozone.

With a pioneering spirit and commitment to innovation, one of the keys to Sensoric’s sustained success over the last quarter of a century is the ability to meet complex application needs and create niche solutions, as City Technology’s Bonn Site Leader, Dr Andreas Koenig explains. “We excel at solving difficult operational challenges through the application of highly specialised technologies that increase accuracy, reliability and sensitivity, removing the obstacles faced by many challenging applications.

Growing demands
for Specialist Sensing

“The specialist gas sensing market is diverse in nature and has grown considerably since we began as an organisation. Besides the growing use of ammonia for refrigeration, the macro trends of increasing safety standards and evolving chemical regulations have led to a need for the more exotic gases like phosphine, diborane and hydrogen chloride. Applications and exact processes vary, creating their own challenges and this means that bespoke gas sensing solutions are often required to provide an exact fit. Since the early 1990s we put a key focus on designing niche products and today we offer 40 sensors detecting 20 different toxic and exotic gases, 60 variations of those cells and expert application support. Bespoke engineering has proved to be a real differentiator for us and this, combined with our advanced technology, has helped us maintain a strong and consistent double digit year-on-year growth.”

Continued innovation and the development of small profile sensing technologies that set the benchmark for performance are key features of the Sensoric range, achieved through consistent investment and the application of best practice manufacturing processes. After the range was introduced in 1990, Sensoric sensors soon became popular with the semiconductor industry through their ability to offer small profile, trace level monitoring with enhanced reliability. This early success led to an expansion into the industrial safety market, and the development of drop-in sensor adaptations for existing instruments. Growth and market expansion soon sparked interest from major gas sensing player First Technology, who acquired the brand in 2004.