What sort of bench gear is needed to check wide band sensors

[Chris Wilson]

I have accumulated a motley collection of used wide band Bosch O2 sensors, mainly LSU 4.0 type. What gear is needed to bench test them? My friend has a good electronics workshop with most test gear and calibrates MOT gas testing machines, so has various calibrated bottles of gasses, and access to other ones. Is it something that can be attempted without the resources of the manufacturers? Thanks.

[JamieA]

Chris,
to be realistic, we have simmilar questions here. At times, we get sensors returned, and would like to verify them. Bosch themselves dont want to know about problems with a lambda sensor used in a race car application, so not much help there.

We have been further investigating calibrated gases, and other methods, but none of the options I would consider perfect. The most common thing that we do is to run multiple sensors on an engine on the engine dyno, and change the fueling to check that they all match over a range of readings.

Not exactly the most scientific method, but we dont really have a better solution at present.

regards,

Jamie

[Chris Wilson]

Thanks Jamie, I was amazed how little info on this a Google search turned up, glad it's not just me. My pal calibrates automotive and industrial gas analysers for a living, I'll ask him if he has any suggestions. Cheers.

[stevieturbo]

Although given how important these are becoming, and how relatively cheap. If in any doubt at all, just bin them.

From a cost point of view, any test procedure would need to be easy and cheap to make it viable, unless you really did have loads of sensors.