“Exploring natural and bio-inspired photonic nanostructures as gas sensors: from scientific curiosity to unexpected discoveries and to societal impact”

When:
November 14, 2024 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm America/New York Timezone
2024-11-14T18:00:00-05:00
2024-11-14T20:00:00-05:00
Where:
MIT Lincoln Labs Forbes Road Cafeteria
3 Forbes Road
Lexington MA

Photonics and Microsystems Chapters:  Joint Technical Seminar IEEE Sensors Council Distinguished Lecture Series

Greetings!

I would like to invite you to our IEEE Microsystems Boston Chapter’s November Tech Talk event. This event is co-sponsored by the IEEE Boston Photonics Chapter. Please find the invitation/flyer attached. The details of the event are as follows:

Speaker: IEEE Sensors Council Distinguished Lecturer, Dr. Radislav A. Potyrailo

Agenda: 

6 – 6:45pm: Networking Dinner

6:45pm – 7:45pm: Tech Talk

RSVP: Please register at your earliest convenience using this link.

This will be an in-person meeting.

Tropical butterflies are a bright display of photonic engineering in nature. Their iridescence originates from the interference and diffraction of light within tree-like nanostructures on their scales, inspiring technological innovations in solar cells, displays, fabrics, and other areas. We are inspired by the design principles of these photonic nanostructures to boost performance of gas sensors because existing gas sensors often degrade their performance in complex environments. Thus, new sensing concepts are required to improve sensor selectivity and stability. In this lecture, we analyse capabilities of natural photonic nanostructures as sensors for detection of different gases and the origins of these capabilities. Our acquired knowledge from studies of these natural nanostructures allows us to develop our design rules to fabricate sensing nanostructures for needed gas selectivity for numerous gas monitoring scenarios at room and high temperatures for industrial, environmental, homeland protection, medical, and other applications. Our design rules for selective gas sensors bring a multivariable perspective for sensing, where selectivity is achieved within a single nanostructured sensing unit, rather than from an array of separate sensors. By utilizing individual nanostructured sensors rather than sensor arrays we also improved sensor stability by eliminating independent aging factors in separate sensors in their arrays. Our existing and new machine learning tools further advanced our sensor designs and performance in multi-gas detection. These new multi-gas sensing capabilities provide an affordable technical solution for monitoring of emissions of greenhouse and other gases in urban and industrial environments. Such technical solution is mathematically not feasible using conventional single-output sensor designs. The societal impact of these results is in opening opportunities for more proactive developments of several types of multivariable gas sensors in diverse emerging monitoring applications, ranging from urban pollution and industrial safety to medical diagnostics and homeland protection.

Thanks and we look forward to meeting you soon!

Adarsh

Chair, IEEE Microsystems Boston Chapter