Less chemical waste in industrial production processes for a greener world
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011— posted by Thomas Skordas, Head of unit “Photonics”, DG INFSO, EU Commission
Science and technology are two elements of utmost importance for finding new answers to old problems. Nowadays, key enabling technologies have the potential of providing innovative solutions to current societal challenges. Photonics (defined by Pierre Aigrain as “the science of the harnessing of light”) is one of these technologies that has already yielded results, in a field where current conventional technologies have approached their limits in terms of speed, capacity and accuracy.
Ethylene is the world’s largest volume industrially produced organic material and propylene the second most used petrochemical commodity. Impurities of those gases in large scale production processes still lead to enormous chemical waste, since the detection of such impurities is a complex and slow process that takes 9 minutes with today’s most sophisticated systems.
However, thanks to a revolutionary EU-funded project called SENSHY, new gas detection systems based on Mid Infrared (MIR) Lasers have been developed that facilitate for the first time ever the detection of impurities in real time thus avoiding chemical waste being produced frequently and in high quantities. The newly developed laser source also facilitates new gas detection systems that identify, for example, methane in a reliable and low-cost manner that will ultimately save miners’ lives.
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