Real Time Ethylene Monitor for Plant Growth Management

Southwest Sciences proposes to develop a real time, compact laser-based ethylene gas analyzer with a detection sensitivity of 25 parts-per-billion by volume or better.nbsp; Ethylene monitoring and control is important to plant growth and health in closed growth chambers such as would be needed for future long-term, manned missions. The analyzer will be fully autonomous and uses newly available, low power diode lasers that operate in the mid-infrared spectral region. The innovation is a novel cavity enhanced spectroscopy method invented at Southwest Sciences that will make the system smaller and more sensitive than conventional tunable diode laser spectroscopy.