SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to enable a new class of gas sensors for the consumer market, specifically in wearables, Internet of Things and smartphones. The technology proposed will sense multiple gases using an inexpensive, compact device with small power requirement. Traditional sensing technology requires a separate device for each gas, making wearable or portable devices impractical. These new devices will be applied in indoor air quality monitoring products such as thermostats, smart lighting, and surveillance cameras; and indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring for wearables and smartphones. These are emerging consumer use cases that could easily exceed 1B units by 2020. The importance of distributed air quality monitoring has been highlighted by recent reports that identify indoor pollution as a significant fraction of the overall pollution exposure for many people. Indoor pollutants vary widely based on the appliances and ventilation used in a particular home or commercial setting, which necessitates continuous monitoring in order to address the problem. There is currently no gas sensor technology capable of delivering this performance with acceptable cost, size, and power requirement.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will build a foundation for the incorporation of porous crystalline hybrid materials into electronic devices. Porous crystalline hybrids have emerged in recent years as a highly attractive class of materials for a host of applications including sensing, catalysis, gas separation, and low-k dielectric materials. For many of these applications the materials must be incorporated into an electronic device as a thin film coating. The techniques for lithographic deposition of these materials, in particular the operating conditions they can endure after being deposited, are almost completely unexplored. Deposition of multiple different porous crystalline hybrids has not been demonstrated. This proposal aims to overcome these obstacles by identifying conditions for reversible protection of porous crystalline hybrid materials during subsequent deposition steps. We anticipate that this work will form the basis for incorporating porous crystals into devices both for gas sensors and for other applications.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project in the long term has two main components. First, the development has potential to reduce the country's overall energy consumption by funding the development of low cost air quality sensors for energy efficient buildings. And second, the project will enhance the safety of our natural gas infrastructure with a low cost, low power methane (natural gas) sensor technology. This work will develop a methane (natural gas) sensor prototype with 10x lower cost, size and power consumption than current solutions. The proposed methane sensor will meet several currently unmet needs. These include enhanced public safety by enabling methane leak detection for natural gas distribution systems, and protecting first responders by enabling more and better methane detection in hazardous environments.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop the world's most porous materials, Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) as a sensing material. MOFs have been an active topic in material science research for over a decade, but they have yet to find a commercial application. This project promises to be the first commercialization of this exciting new class of materials. Nearly 40,000 different MOF structures have been identified to date. The crux of this work is to use a combination of computer models and laboratory experimentation to optimize a MOF structure that selectively and rapidly absorbs methane gas. The end goal of this project is to develop a commercial prototype methane sensor 'on a chip' that consists of a solid state mass transducer with the MOF coating that has been tuned for sensing methane.