Ultra High Sensitivity SWIR Methane Imaging Camera

Methane is the third most prevalent greenhouse gas, whose atmospheric concentration is currently over 1.7 ppm and is about 21 times more potent when compared to CO2. Thus, while the quantitative monitoring of methane levels is necessary, it is also critically important to directly identify the sources of the methane emissions, for example, in ice floes, leaks in pipelines, and also from drilling/fracking and other anthropogenic activities. The Phase I effort has indicated that a new class of detector – resonant cavity enhanced photo detector – can be successfully manufactured with excellent resonance at the absorption band for methane. This is a significant result, and provides for the first time narrow band infrared detector that has significantly improved performance over any existing infrared detector. For the Phase II effort we will develop an inexpensive methane gas imaging camera, that can be used for direct observation of methane gas/emission. The imaging array uses the advanced resonant cavity enhanced photo-detector (RCE-PD) design that can be tuned to the absorption spectrum of the gas (i.e. methane). This camera will be high sensitivity, low power, and lightweight so it can be readily integrated onto UAV’s platforms and hand held systems.