In recent years there has been a rapidly increasing demand for CO2 sensors for applications in health monitoring, control of air quality and horticulture. Amongst the various approaches reported so far, the AlGaInSb quaternary alloy shows great promise for the development of compact Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) as it offers bandgap Type-I alignments, which enable the design of effective multi-quantum well (MQW) active regions. In this paper we show a more than fourfold improvement in wall-plug efficiency by optimising both the strain in AlGaInSb MQW active regions and the fabrication process flow of LEDs emitting at 4.26 um.
In recent years there has been a rapidly increasing demand for energy-efficient and cost effective gas sensors. Of particular interest are CO2 sensors that can find numerous applications in health monitoring, control of air quality and horticulture. A major hurdle comes from the fact that the main CO2 absorption band lies above 4um, where very few cheap and compact sources are commercially available. Amongst the various approaches explored, the indium antimonide material system stands out as a very effective solution for the development of compact Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). In particular, the quaternary compound AlGaInSb shows great promise as it offers a bandgap type-I alignment, which enables the design of effective multi-quantum well (MQW) active regions.
In this paper we show the great potential of LED structures with strained GaInSb MQWs and AlGaInSb barriers for the next generation of mid-IR emitters at 4.3 um. Different quantum well and barrier compositions were examined through k.p simulations to extract momentum matrix elements and energy levels. The simulations were also used to assess the impact of strain and quantum well width on the efficiency of the radiative transition and to optimise the profile of the carrier injection. Based on the theoretical analysis, a number of different epilayer structures were grown by molecular beam epitaxy and the performance of LEDs with varying geometries were compared. Results confirm that strained MQW structures suppress unwanted transitions by at least one order of magnitude and provide a substantial enhancement in the internal quantum efficiency of the LEDs.
Mid-IR carbon dioxide (CO2) gas sensing is critical for monitoring in respiratory care, and is finding increasing importance in surgical anaesthetics where nitrous oxide (N2O) induced cross-talk is a major obstacle to accurate CO2 monitoring. In this work, a novel, solid state mid-IR photonics based CO2 gas sensor is described, and the role that 1- dimensional photonic crystals, often referred to as multilayer thin film optical coatings [1], play in boosting the sensor’s capability of gas discrimination is discussed. Filter performance in isolating CO2 IR absorption is tested on an optical filter test bed and a theoretical gas sensor model is developed, with the inclusion of a modelled multilayer optical filter to analyse the efficacy of optical filtering on eliminating N2O induced cross-talk for this particular gas sensor architecture. Future possible in-house optical filter fabrication techniques are discussed. As the actual gas sensor configuration is small, it would be challenging to manufacture a filter of the correct size; dismantling the sensor and mounting a new filter for different optical coating designs each time would prove to be laborious. For this reason, an optical filter testbed set-up is described and, using a commercial optical filter, it is demonstrated that cross-talk can be considerably reduced; cross-talk is minimal even for very high concentrations of N2O, which are unlikely to be encountered in exhaled surgical anaesthetic patient breath profiles. A completely new and versatile system for breath emulation is described and the capability it has for producing realistic human exhaled CO2 vs. time waveforms is shown. The cross-talk inducing effect that N2O has on realistic emulated CO2 vs. time waveforms as measured using the NDIR gas sensing technique is demonstrated and the effect that optical filtering will have on said cross-talk is discussed.
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