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Sapphire fiber has been studied intensively for harsh environment sensing in the past two decades due to its supreme mechanical, physical and optical properties. It is by far the most reported and likely the best optical fiber based sensing technology for sensing applications in temperature beyond 1000°C. Several sensing schemes have been proposed and studied to date including sapphire fiber extrinsic and intrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometers, fiber Bragg gratings and long period gratings inscribed in sapphire fibers. Lacking the cladding, sapphire fiber is highly multi-moded which renders sapphire fiber based sensor fabrication much more difficult than those based on silica fibers. Among all the reported work on sapphire fiber sensing, the vast majority is for single point temperature measurement. In this work, different sensing schemes are proposed to enhance the capability of the sapphire fiber based sensing technology. For the single point sensing, a miniaturized sapphire fiber temperature sensor for embedded sensing applications was proposed and studied. The sensors are no more than 75 µm in diameter and are ideal for non-invasive embedded sensing applications. Unlike existing sapphire fiber sensors, the thin film sensors are batch-fabrication oriented and thus have a potential to permit mass production with low cost. In addition to single point sensors, multiplexed sapphire fiber sensing systems are investigated for the first time. Two multiplexed sensing solutions, named frequency-multiplexing and spatial-multiplexing, are proposed and studied to achieve multiplexed sensing based on sapphire fibers. / Ph. D.

Electronics are normally designed to operate at temperatures less than 125 oC. For high temperature applications, the use of those normal electronics becomes challenging and sometimes impractical. Conventionally, many industries tried to push the maximum operating temperature of electronics by either using passive/active cooling systems or tolerating degraded performance. Recently, there has been a demand for more robust electronics that can operate at higher temperature without sacrificing the performance or the use of any weighty, power hungry, complex cooling systems. One of the major industries that need electronics operating at high temperature is the oil and gas industry. Electronics have been used within the field in many areas, such as well logging downhole telemetry systems, power networks, sensors, and actuators. In the past, the industry has managed to use the existing electronics at temperatures up to 150 oC. However, declining reserves of easily accessible natural resources have motivated the oil and gas industry to drill deeper. The main challenge at deep wells for downhole electronics is the high temperatures as the pressures are handled mechanically. The temperature in deep basins can exceed 210 oC. In addition, existing well logging telemetry systems achieve low data transmission rates of less than 2.0 Mbps at depth of 7.0 Km which do not meet the growing demand for higher data rates due to higher resolution sensors, faster logging speeds, and additional tools available for a single wireline cable. The main issues limiting the speed of the systems are the bandwidth of multi-conductor copper cable and the low speed communication system connecting the tools with the telemetry modem. The next generation of the well logging telemetry system replaces the multi-conductor wireline between the surface and the downhole with an optical fiber cable and uses a coaxial cable to connect tools with the optical node in downhole to meet the growing needs for higher data rates. However, the downhole communication system between the tools and the optical modulator remains the bottleneck for the system. The downhole system is required to provide full duplex and simultaneous communications between multiple downhole tools and the surface with high data rates and able to operate reliably at temperatures up to 230 oC. In this dissertation, a downhole communication system based on radio frequency (RF) transmission is investigated. The major contributions of our research lie in five areas. First, we proposed and designed a downhole communication system that employs RF systems to provide high speed communications between the downhole tools and the surface. The system supports up to six tools and utilizes frequency division multiple access to provide full duplex and simultaneous communications between downhole tools and the surface data acquisition system. The system achieves 20 Mbps per tool for uplink and 6 Mbps per tool for downlink with bit error rate (BER) less than 10-6. Second, a RF front-end of transceiver operating at ambient temperatures up to 230 oC is designed and prototyped using Gallium Nitride (GaN) high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) devices. Measurement results of the transceiver's front end are reported in this dissertation. To our knowledge, this is the first RF transceiver that operates at this high temperature. Third, current-voltage and S-parameters characterizations of the GaN HEMT at ambient temperatures of 250 oC are conducted. An analytic model that accurately predicts the behavior of the drain-source resistor (RDS) of the GaN transistor at temperature up to 250 oC is developed based on these characterizations. The model is verified by the analysis and the performance of the resistive mixer. Fourth, a passive upconversion mixer operating at temperatures of 250 oC is designed and prototyped. The designed mixer has conversion loss (CL) of 6.5 dB at 25 oC under local oscillator (LO) power of 2.5 dBm and less than 0.75 dB CL variation at 250 oC under the optimum biasing condition. Fifth, an active downconversion mixer operating at temperatures up to 250 oC is designed and prototyped. The proposed mixer adopts a common source topology for a reliable thermal connection to the transistor source plate. The designed active mixer has conversion gain (CG) of 12 dB at 25 oC under LO power of 2.5 dBm and less than 3.0 dB CG variation at 250 oC. Finally, a novel high temperature negative adaptive bias voltage circuit for a GaN based RF block is proposed. The proposed design comprises an oscillator, voltage doubler, and temperature dependent bias controller. The voltage offset and temperature coefficient of the generated bias voltage can be adjusted by the bias controller to match the optimum biasing voltage required by a RF building block. The bias controller is designed using a Silicon Carbide (SiC) bipolar junction transistor. / PHD

Temperature sensing is one of the most common and needed sensing technique, especially in harsh environment like a coal gasifier or an airplane engine. Single crystal sapphire has been studied in the last two decades as a candidate for harsh environment sensing task, due to its excellent mechanical and optical properties under extreme high temperature (over 1000°C). In this research, a sapphire wafer based Fabry-Perot (FP) interferometer sensor has been proposed, whose functional temperature measurement can go beyond 1600°C. The size of the sensors can be limited to a 2cm-length tube, with 2mm outer diameter, which is suitable for a wide range of harsh environment applications. The sensors have shown linear sensing response during 20~1200°C temperature calibration, with high sensitivity and resolution, and strong robustness, which are ready for the field test in real-world harsh environment. / Master of Science

Le travail présenté dans ce mémoire est basé sur l’étude et le développement d’une chaine analogique de traitement du signal destinée à la détection de particules issues d’un réacteur nucléaire. Le détecteur de radiations relatif à cette chaine, étant placé au cœur du réacteur (hautes températures et radiations), deux scénarii d’intégration de la chaine analogique en environnement sévère ont été étudiés. Tandis que le premier scénario consiste à placer le préamplificateur et l’amplificateur de mise en forme loin du détecteur, le deuxième est basé sur l’intégration de ces blocs analogiques en environnement contraint. Bien que le premier scénario ait démontré de bonnes performances en termes de linéarité et sensibilité, l’amélioration de la résolution digitale fournie par le système nous a mené à investiguer le placement de la chaine tout près du détecteur. Plusieurs études, basées sur l’évaluation de la fiabilité de la structure vis-à-vis des contraintes de l’environnement sévère ont été donc élaborées. De plus une solution innovante permettant une meilleure caractérisation de la particule incidente a été présentée et détaillée. / The work presented in this thesis is based on the study and development of an analog processing chain dedicated to the detection of particles delivred from a nuclear reactor. The radiation detector related to this chain, being placed at the heart of the reactor (high temperatures and radiation flux), two scenraii related to the integration of the analog chain in harsh environment were studied. While the first scenario consists on placing the preamplifier and the shaping amplifier away from the detector, the second is based on the integration of these analog blocks in harsh environment. Although the first scenario has proven good performances in terms of linearity and sensitivity, the improvement of the digital resolution provided by the system leaded us to investigate the placement of the chain close to the detector. Several studies based on the evaluation of the structure reliability under harsh environment constraints were thus elaborated. In addition, an innovative solution providing better characterization of the incident particle was presented and detailed.

The continual development of high-power-density power electronic converters is driven particularly by modern transportation applications like electrical vehicles and more electric aircraft where the space and carrier capability is limited. However, there are several challenges related to transportation applications such as fault tolerance for safety concern, high temperature operation in extreme environments and more strict electromagnetic compatibility requirement. These challenges will increase difficulties for more electrical system adoption in the transportation applications. In this dissertation, comprehensive methodologies including more efficient energy storage solution, better power electronics devices capability, better packaging performance and more compact EMI filter design are analyzed and proposed for the goal of high power density converter design in transportation applications. / Ph. D.

Growing need for application of electronics at temperatures beyond their rated limit, (usually > 150 °C) and the non availability of high temperature compatible electronics necessitates thermal management solutions that should be compact, scalable, reliable and be able to work in environments characterized by high temperature (150 -250 °C), mechanical shock and vibrations. In this backdrop the proposed research aims at realization of an adsorption cooling system for evaporator temperatures in the range of 140 °C-150 °C, and condenser temperature in the range of 160 °C-200 °C. Adsorption cooling systems have few moving parts (hence less maintenance issues), and the use of Thermo-Electric (TE) devices to regenerate heat of adsorption in between adsorbent beds enhances the compactness and efficiency of the overall 'ThermoElectric-Adsorption' (TEA) system. The work presented identifies the challenges involved and respective solutions for high temperature application. An experimental set up was fabricated to demonstrate system operation and mathematical models developed to benchmark experimental results. Also, it should be noted that TEA system comprises TE and adsorption chillers. A TE device can be a compact cooler in its own right. Hence a comparison of the performance of TEA and TE cooling systems has also been presented.