REDFINCH

REDFINCH is a consortium of eight European research institutes and companies undertaking cutting edge R&D into novel, high performance, cost effective chemical sensors, based on Mid-Infrared Photonic Integrated Circuits (MIR PICs). Silicon PICs – integrating optical circuits onto millimetre-size silicon chips- create extremely robust miniature systems, in which discrete components are replaced by on-chip equivalents. This gives a simultaneous improvement in ease of use and a reduction in cost.

The REDFINCH partners are addressing the significant challenge of implementing this in the important mid-infrared region (2-20 µm wavelength range), where many important chemical and biological species have strong absorption fingerprints. This allows for the detection and concentration measurement of a wide range of gases, liquids and biomolecules, crucial for applications such as health monitoring and diagnosis, detection of biological compounds, monitoring of toxic gases, and many more.

Despite the importance of the mid-infrared (MIR) wavelength region for a wide range of application areas, current state-of-the-art sensing systems in the MIR tend to be large and delicate. This greatly hampers their deployment in real-world applications. REDFINCH will realise three fully-integrated PIC-based chemical sensor demonstrators to focus on the key applications of:

• Process gas analysis in refineries
• Gas leak detection in petrochemical plants and pipelines
• Protein analysis in liquids for the dairy industry