Safety and real-time monitoring is becoming the central issue in chemical factories, oil and gas reservoirs, refineries and related land and marine transportation infrastructure. The lack of real-time knowledge of constantly changing conditions in all these facilities causes delayed responses to critical situations such as equipment failure, chemical spills and fire hazards. This results in health and safety risks which endanger lives and create huge financial risk; factors which result in operational downtime and possible environmental damage.
This project will develop optical fibre integrated nanophotonic metamaterial sensors (meta-sensors) that can be used to resolve these issues and help the energy and transportation industry operate more efficiently and safely by providing a means to real-time remote sensing and spatial mapping of critical gas species within these facilities and systems. In this context the metamaterials act as high sensitivity, miniaturized sensors and the optical fibre as a continuous real-time remote read-out mechanism.
Josh Perkins received his BSc/MSc at Utah State University. His research interest at that time was graphene and antenna design focusing on the viability of monolithically integrated graphene MEMS switches for radiation beam steering. His current research interests include integrating nanophotonic metamaterial sensors with optical fibers, novel nanofabrication techniques, as well as carbon-based devices.
Prof Behrad Gholipour, Assistant Professor at UofA, has made pioneering contributions to the design, manufacturing and characterization of nanophotonic metamaterials, complex semiconductor optoelectronics and multimaterial optical fibres with applications in telecommunication, computing and sensing. Having led projects in the UK, Singapore and Canada, his work has resulted in >100 peer reviewed journal and conference publications, including, high profile publications in Science, Nature Materials, Nature Photonics, Nano Letters and Advanced Materials journals, 7 of which have been chosen as magazine cover articles. He is a recipient of the prestigious UK ICT Pioneer award and is currently a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Optics and the program committee of the SPIE Metamaterials 2019 conference (the premier metamaterials conference in the world). He is a frequent invited speaker at various conferences in optics and materials science and a referee for >10 leading publications in nanotechnology.
Southampton/ UK
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