Post-Conference/Flying Solo

(Written August 10^th, posted August 11^th)

I have now returned to the Princeton Engineering Quad to continue the task of Mid-IR Industry-Roadmapping, and Kelsey is off in New York taking part in the Take Dance Intensive then back to Princeton for her senior year. Needless to say, it was a pleasure working with her, and I know we accomplished much this summer due to her inquisitive nature and her hard work and dedication.

The MIRTHE conference in NYC was awesome- while I was certainly in over my head for a number of science talks, what was more important was the excitement of the students and industry members for this technology. Also, while Kelsey and I both understood there is still much work to be done, we were pleased with how responsive and enthusiastic the industry members and students were about our talk, and how open they were to helping us further the roadmap. Overall, it was a great experience.

In other news, today in Princeton there are both excessive heat warnings, and air quality alerts. After a summer of researching requirements for environmental sensing, and then last week in the high emphasis placed on environmental monitoring, I remembered one of the first things Claire said to me about MIRTHE. She told me how we take for granted the air we breathe is safe, and the environments we inhabit are not detrimental to our health. But, as we see today, this is not always the case. And, if we continue on in a “business as usual” model, or if we had in the past before the Clean Air Act, our atmosphere would not be safe and our society would be suffering a range of problems associated with high pollution levels. However, numerous regulations have been put in place, and today, America is a safer place because of this.

But there is still work to be done. If today in New Jersey is any indication, we still need help. Globally, America is far ahead of developing countries like China and India, where air quality and water quality are major problems. Furthermore, global warming is changing our climate in unpredictable and dangerous ways, and yet we are still pumping GHGs and toxins into our atmosphere at an unsustainable rate.

As James Butler said in his talk on supporting Greenhouse Gas Management Strategies, there is no real way to create effective regulation legislation without means to measure pollutant levels. One of the best parts of MIRTHE is in addition to forging the way in the fields of breath analysis, explosives detection and industrial process detection, MIRTHE does so while working to better understand climate and atmospheric changes which are so closely tied to the lives of human beings all over the planet. Because of the interconnectivity of the challenges QCL sensors, MIRTHE is able to work to monitor the environment AND contribute to many viable and lucrative fields.

And I think that’s pretty cool.

-Peter

Roadmapping: A Challenge and (we hope) a Solution

As we see it, one of the fundamental difficulties with constructing a technology roadmap for QCL sensors systems is that technology changes in unpredictable ways. This means it is challenging to define what exactly the components will look like in QCL sensors in ten years, because in ten years the detectors or optics or systems may resemble something which we would not have predicted today.

We therefore construct our roadmap as a goal-oriented plan. We know what the test sensors looked like in all the Thrust 5 (Applications and Testbeds) Projects. We also have spoken extensively with Claire Gmachl and a number of researchers and industry partners within MIRTHE, and they have expressed their goals for QCL development. Therefore our main goals are to identify what each device would look like for each application, and determine what its product specifications would be. As MIRTHE has hopes for QCL sensing in industrial processing, environmental monitoring, and homeland security, there are many unique devices which must be characterized, as, for example, a networked methane sensor to be deployed on a glacier would look very different from a device used in a doctor’s office used to measure exhaled ammonia. By knowing what these devices should look like and what their characteristics should be, we will present an endpoint for joint efforts of the MIRTHE Center’s research and the development by the Industry Partners. From there, we will do our best to “fill-in-the-blanks,” and try to identify the technical developments needed to arrive at the endpoint, and identify any intermediate products which could have commercial or research applications.

Roadmapping: The Game Plan

Since the Center’s initiation three years ago, MIRTHE has come a long way. It has successfully deployed QCL sensors in Beijing, has begun clinical testing of Mid-IR detectors in breath analysis, and has created a wide range of sensors which can operate at room temperature. The costs, weight, size and sensitivity of the sensors vary greatly now and will likely continue to vary, but as the techniques get better and the process for making the QCLs become more efficient, the goal of highly accurate point sensors which can cost only a few hundred dollars is something that seems possible.

This is where we stand. The question now is to characterize where we want to go. In environmental sensing, this means creating networks of sensors which can communicate wirelessly and handle huge amounts of data to determine pollution sources or describe environmental systems. In medicine, this means creating handheld, accurate and efficient NH3 detectors which can diagnosis patient-specific treatments for liver or kidney disease. In homeland security, this means developing sensors which can replace bomb sniffing dogs to create safer detection systems in dangerous areas. This is a short list, but we could go on to discuss QCL sensors in automobiles, green buildings, power plants, chemical plants, atmospheric sensing, public health, cancer detection and many other applications. We believe each of these applications have specific requirements making a “universal sensor” irrelevant; we plan on coupling projects which require similar sensors, and will define the characteristics (costs, capabilities, design specs, etc) needed for businesses and government organizations to institute such systems. In the end, the roadmap will identify specifications of the final products, and will discuss the best path to get to the final products.

We have begun calling members of MIRTHE working on projects as well as those involved in the industries today. If you are reading this and want to talk with us sooner, please send an email to pschram@princeton.edu. We would look forward to hearing from you.

In other news, Claire’s lab welcomed a group of high school students to join in her research yesterday. Since then, the lab candy jar has been depleted at an alarming rate. More developments on this later.