What’s a plasma?
A plasma is an ionized gas, often considered to be the 4th state of matter. Excitation of a plasma requires exposure beyond a medium's ionization potential where electrons are stripped from neutral atoms and become ionized to create a luminous glow.

How does it work?
As air enters the Optomem micro plasma source, atoms and molecules become excited. During relaxation, emitted light (photons) are detected and processed to distinguish the gas species present in the air.

"SMART" technology
Optomem’s sensor platform integrates a plasma source and optical detector onto a silicon wafer. The device allows for spectroscopic analysis across the visible and into the near infrared electromagnetic spectrum.

How is it different?
Gas sensors can be found in automobiles, HVAC systems, process control, military, hospitals, emergency/HAZMAT teams, underground workers, in domestic use and a myriad of other applications. Optomem’s disruptive advantages include low fabrication cost, micron dimension, and versatile response capabilities, which creates a wide array of commercial possibilities for gas detection.

Versatile
The sensor platform offers an unprecedented opportunity for the development of a smart sensor network, combining sensors and wireless technology to measure point source, off-property and hard to reach areas of air quality concern. Large instrumentation manufacturers can take advantage of a smaller, lower power excitation source for analytical spectroscopy.

The advantage
Optomem’s micro-optical sensors offer the advantage of low cost batch fabrication, ultra low power consumption, portability, robustness and multi analyte discriminative detection. Conventional sensor technologies are limited to selective or broad range gas detection. Multi analyte discriminative detection takes place in a lab, using costly and cumbersome equipment.

Other design benefits include fast detection response time, improved resistance to environmental changes, versatile design and packaging options.

Advanced algorithms
The ability for optical detection through emission spectroscopy enables advanced computational algorithms to drive analytics further than ever to provide defined user feedback results for specific and/or multiple gas detection, gas separation measurements, and many other analysis tools. The Optomem technology instantaneously detects what would take analytical laboratory equipment or gas chromatography several minutes to compute.  When every second counts, the technology can help to save lives, the environment, reduce manufacturing costs, protect equipment, and provide a strong defense against the effects of harmful air quality.