The goal of this SBIR project is to provide NASA a mobile/airborne imaging system for remote high accuracy detection of gas emission source. The core of the imager is a high speed tunable filter with both wide tuning range and narrow bandwidth in MWIR. First of all it is a great candidate for general airborne multispectral/hyperspectral imaging. Besides remote gas sensing, due to its outstanding ability of acquiring spectral information, it will find many NASA applications in fields of engineering, natural resource exploration, environmental monitoring etc. For example, it can be applied to combustion research for jet engine diagnosis. By capturing emission spectrum and using multi-wavelength algorithm the 2D measurement of flame temperature is realized at once. The technical approach used for gas detection in this project can also be applied to measurement of species concentration in flame.
Multispectral/hyperspectral imaging technologies have found broad applications in homeland security, military surveillance, biomedical science, agriculture, chemical industry, forestry, emergency response/disaster management, insurance, and oil/gas exploration. The proposed core technology, a novel hyperspectral imaging approach, holds great potential in all these non-NASA applications where x-y-λ cube data is required. Commercialization in any of these areas can be highly profitable.
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