Research around laser sensors designed in the department of chemical
engineering has been highlighted in the latest issue of
EPSRC's newsline magazine (page 6ff).
The issue is focused on novel green technologies and the sensors could
help in the design of next generation low emission engines in the aero and
automobile industries. Dr. Johan Hult, member of the Laser Analytics
group and an EPSRC Advanced
Research Fellow, has developed a method of generating ultra fast
wavelength
sweeps covering several hundreds of nanometres in wavelength at
repetition
rates exceeding 10 million times a second. This extraordinary
technology
permits the dynamic tracking of chemical phenomena in situ at unrivalled
time resolution, yielding insights into processes such as pollutant
formation and combustion generated engine instabilities. There are also
promising applications in other fields such as biomedical sensing.
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