This study investigates the feasibility of using hydrogenated carbon thin films deposited by pulsed DC sputtering as an alternative durable optical thin film material for infrared applications. The study focuses on how the mechanical and optical characteristics of the deposited carbon thin films vary with hydrogen content. To precisely control the hydrogen incorporation in the carbon layers, pulsed DC deposition was used in conjunction with a controlled hydrogen generator. This allowed for a methodical investigation of the link between hydrogen content, stresses, transmittance, reflectance, and absorptance. Results of increasing hydrogen content within the carbon films demonstrate a reduction in stress, absorptance and hardness. The hydrogen acts to alleviate the compressive stress levels and mitigate the mechanical durability challenges within the film. Such films have applications in systems that require mechanically robust optical coatings such as antireflection infrared coatings for common infrared substrate materials.
In this work, a new optical coating design concept is proposed for gravitational wave detector (GWD) utilising, microwave plasma assisted sputtering of a high reflector (HR) multi-material stack coating consisting of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H), Ta2O5 and SiO2 for GWD’s mirror coatings. This work includes the study of the optical, mechanical, structural and morphological properties of the coating to evaluate the potential of the materials for GWDs. Benefits of the microwave plasma assisted sputter deposition technique are described. a-Si is a promising alternative material for GWD mirror coatings, as it has been demonstrated to have reduced thermal noise, however, has optical absorption above the required level for GWDs. The HR multi-material coating design concept is a way potentially mediate the high absorption a-Si whilst taking advantage of its reduced thermal noise, incorporating the a-Si material into a Ta2O5 and SiO2 based HR multilayer coating. Hydrogenating a-Si (a-Si:H) is another method to reduce the absorption with the hydrogen concentration being an important parameter, this work combines these techniques to further lower the absorption. The multi-material coating consists of an ‘upper stack’ of Ta2O5/SiO2 low absorbing material on the incident side of the coating used to reflect the majority of the incident laser power and a ‘lower stack’ of a a-Si:H/SiO2 higher absorbing materials at the bottom of the coating where there is less laser power to be absorbed. In addition to investigating the effectiveness of the two-stack approach for optimum compromise between optical and mechanical loss reduction, this work also studies the effect of annealing on the properties of the multi-material coating. Moreover, effects of the deposition parameters such as deposition rate on each material are investigated and utilised to optimise properties the two-stack coating approach.
Methane is a significant contributor to global warming so reducing methane emissions, particularly from oil and gas operations, is among the most cost effective, impactful actions governments can take to achieve climate goals. Preventing methane leakage impacts economic productivity and worker safety too. Large-site leak detection requires reliable cost-effective distributed sensors.
Methane leakage is also an issue for several other industries. However, hard wiring is not practical or cost effective and battery power is unacceptable due to the need for regular changes requiring engineers working in hazardous areas at great expense. The sustainability challenge of additional travel associated with device maintenance and disposal of used batteries in the millions is also environmentally unacceptable. Worker safety monitoring with lower-cost portable methane detectors requires bulky, rechargeable battery-powered devices that the industry is seeking to avoid for operational and environmental reasons. Various low-cost sensor technologies have been applied to methane sensing (catalytic, optical - non-dispersive infrared (NDIR), semiconducting metal oxide and electrochemical) with catalytic/pellistor sensors formerly being dominant but in recent years replaced by NDIR sensors overcoming issues of accuracy, susceptibility to poisoning, short lifetimes, power consumption, recalibration and requirement for oxygen presence. It also has the advantage of being a fail-to-safe technology.
In this work, we present an optical NDIR gas sensor that uses a fast-response semiconductor light source/detector optopair operating at <1 mW power consumption, compatible with powering from photovoltaic based energy harvesting. This is a step change from current state-of-the-art gas sensor technologies and orders of magnitude lower than filament/thermopile based detectors. Fabrication of the sensor is discussed, including; semiconductor mid-IR optopair fabrication, mid-IR optical interference filter deposition and injection molded 2-mirror parabolic reflector optical system preparation. Sensor response to methane is discussed and light harvesting operation is demonstrated, enabling compatibility with wireless distributed methane sensor networks.
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.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.