Designing and manufacturing equipment for the aviation and aerospace industry requires precision and reliability unlike any other industry. Today, modern military and commercial aircrafts rely on numerous highly sophisticated (and highly sensitive) electronic systems for safe flight. Whether it’s the engines, landing gears, actuators, navigational systems, or communication equipment, these systems require hermetic connectors capable of withstanding the demands of extreme aerospace applications to perform as they should.
Hermetically sealed connectors protect against various environmental conditions such as changes in atmospheric pressure, humidity and moisture, and high temperatures that would otherwise disrupt or damage electrical connections. Protecting these delicate systems are paramount when considering the safety of manned aircraft. And now, as innovation increases, with improvements in sustainability and the move towards more unmanned aircraft and autonomous vehicles, the role of things like custom hermetic connectors become increasingly important.
In this article, we highlight what to keep in mind when it comes to finding the right hermetically sealed connector for your project.
Selecting the Right Hermetic Connector: What You Need to Know
Proper selection and installation of hermetic connectors directly impact the reliability of an aircraft’s electronic systems — and ultimately the safety of the aircraft as whole. When choosing the right hermetic connector for the job, consider the following factors:
- Environmental Conditions: External elements can impact the performance of your connector. Always consider environmental conditions like temperature, pressure, vibrations or shock, and moisture that surround the location of the connector.
- Materials: Hermetic connectors are made with a variety of different materials including metal, glass, ceramic, and polymers or epoxies — each having its pros and cons. When selecting a material, it’s important to always consider the environment and performance requirements to avoid material selection that is overqualified, or underqualified, for the task at hand.
- Technology and Design: Hermetic connectors are made up of several different elements including the seal, the pins, and the attachment itself — each playing a different role and having its own performance specifications. For most applications, a qualified hermetic connector will do the job. However, in some applications, modular updates to standard spec connectors or complete custom designs may be needed.
- Customization: Despite the availability of hundreds of standard, off-the-shelf connector models, certain physical requirements such as size constraints and increased performance specifications are driving demand for proprietary designs that require some form of customization. The materials of the seal, the number of pins, the length and width of pins, and the design of the connector itself can be customized.
Our
Insider’s Guide to Customizing Hermetic Connectors will tell you everything you need to know. In this whitepaper, we look at market trends driving decisions, key issues impacting the customization process, and questions to ask to accelerate the design process.
About Hermetic Seal Corporation
Hermetic Seal is well known for space-grade quality, having supported lunar and Mars missions alike for many decades. In fact, our products were part of the original Mars Rover, the Artemis Moon Constellation Project, upgrades to the International Space Station, and NASA’s New Horizons initiative.
Since 1945, Hermetic Seal Corporation has been the go-to premier designer and manufacturer of high-reliability custom hermetically sealed electrical interconnection devices. Its products are used in sensing and actuating systems by the aerospace and defense, oil and gas, and medical device industries worldwide.