MIT's tiny gas detector: Detects hazardeous gases in no time
Researchers at MIT are building a tiny detector that will help protect water supplies, in medical diagnostics and can even detect hazardeous gases in case of minute leaks in plants. They have already scaled down this detector to a size of a computer mouse and their target is to develop a sensor that is as small as a matchbox within next 2 years. Akinwande, a professor and team leader said, "Everything we're doing has been done on a macro scale. We are just scaling it down."
Akinwande will be hopefully presenting his teams work at Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) 2008 conference which is scheduled for next week. He said that scaled down versions of gas detectors will prove really beneficial as they could then be used easily in real-world environment and can also be implemented in projects which are not huge enough. Smaller devices will use lesser power and will be more sensitive.
Team working on this project includes scientists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Texas at Dallas, Clean Earth Technology and Raytheon and MIT. This tiny detector uses chromatography and mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to identify gases by their telltale electronic signatures to produce results in mere 4 seconds and uses only four joules of energy. It is great improvement over currently used GC-MS machines which give results in over 15 minutes and burn 10,000 joules of energy. These big machines are around 40,000 CC in size.
Firstly gas molecules are broken into ionized fragments which are detectable due to their ratio of charge to molecular weight. These fragments are then sent through long and narrow electric field. Charges of the ions are converted to voltage and then measured by an electrometer this tells about molecule's distinctive electronic signature. This research was started 3 years ago with the financial support of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass.
Via: NanoTech
