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.