Optical gas sensors offer numerous advantages in process monitoring and medical breath analysis. For some applications, this requires a fast response time in the range of 10 ms, for example, in order to be able to detect and evaluate individual breaths with sufficiently high time resolution. At the same time, a high optical performance of the infrared emitters used in these applications is required. This is where the “Fast Infrared Emitter Arrays – FIRE” project comes in: instead of the usual thermal emission from a large-area heating element, an array of several small radiating areas will now be created on a chip. Due to the smaller areas – and therefore also smaller individual thermal masses – these arrays will achieve a significantly faster switching behavior with simultaneously high optical performance. In addition to theoretical model development, the goals and content of the newly launched research project are primarily the further development of silicon technologies and the production and testing of demonstrators.
The research and development work in the project “Nimble Infrared Emitter Array” (FIRE) is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action.
Funding code: 49MF220020
