Greenhouse Gas sensors based on Surface Plasmon Resonance devices

forthcoming

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are one of the actual major threats of the humanity. These emissions need to be reduced and are monitored by reference sensors’ systems, which are highly sensitive and selective, costly, complex and require specific installation conditions. Due to these limitations, only few of these systems are installed. To complement them and provide high spatial resolution gas sensor maps, the deployment of a large number of sensors is required. This can be achieved thanks to Internet of Things (IoT), but which poses stringent conditions of low power consumption and miniaturisation. The GasSPR project aims at developing advanced optical gas sensing devices suitable for IoT. These innovative sensors will be based on the combination of Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) sensing principle with Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) as the gas absorbent material. Three different configurations will be studied: planar grating-coupled (GC-SPR), peeled optical fibre (OF-SPR) and fibre Bragg gratings (FBG-SPR) SPR sensors, on top of which various MOFs as absorbing materials will be deposited to achieve, simultaneously, the highest GHG adsorption and the largest refractive index variation. In this way, we aim at the highest sensitivity of these devices. The goal is to detect, at least, one of the 3 main GHGs, namely CO2, CH4, and N2O, at a level below the atmospheric concentration. The proposed methodology involves interdisciplinary collaboration across various fields, including physics, chemistry, nanotechnology, electronic engineering, photonics and information processing and has been carefully designed to optimise the bidirectional exchange of competences and skills between the host and the researcher and to boost the researchers’ carreer.