A zirconia oxygen sensor for lean combustion control system was fabricated and investigated. The device has a structure of two square zirconia plates with a large aperture at one end. One plate acts as a pumping cell and the other as a sensing cell. The sensor exhibits switching properties of a few hundreds of mV at the desired oxygen concentration for a given pumping current. In addition, this structure shows a highly sensitive variation of pumping current with oxygen concentration, and is relatively insensitive to the working temperature.
The sensor is tested in the real LNG combustion system. This results show this sensor can be applied to systems such as car engines and boilers to control combustion for fuel efficiency and reduced air pollution.
