Queen's Award for Sentec

Sentec achieved the growth necessary to win the award by implementing a successful market strategy based on licensing selected partners and supporting them with product development and consultancy services.

The result is that Sentec technology is now included in almost 7m (or around half) of the smart electricity meters installed in the US today.

In the UK, the Queen’s Award for Enterprise comes as the company announces a licensing agreement with OnStream, a National Grid company, to bring Sentec’s Mobius current sensor technology to the UK smart electric meter market.

The company’s patented Mobius sensor consists of a current-carrying conductor (either a bus-bar or a circuit board trace) and a pickup formed from a convoluted coil fabricated on layers of a printed circuit board (PCB). The conductor runs parallel to the PCB in the vicinity of the pickup coil, in close proximity but electrically isolated.

Three sensor geometries are available to suit different applications: an omega-shaped conductor best suited to low-cost single sensor implementations; a linear conductor suited to implementations needing multiple parallel sensors; and a hairpin conductor form best suited to multiple sensors with adjacent terminal connections. The bus-bar shape can be optimised to fit the current and geometry requirements of the specific design — maximum current ratings from 20 to 320A have already been designed into products.