Subventions et des contributions :

Subvention ou bourse octroyée s'appliquant à plus d'un exercice financier (2017-2018 à 2018-2019).

Humidity and dew monitoring is very critical for various application. According to a 2017 Frost and Sullivanx000D
market report (see ref. [3]) of proposal), "the global humidity and moisture sensors market size is expected tox000D
hit USD 1.90 billion by 2023." Current technologies are mostly electrical ones such as CMOS, MEMS, TFPT,x000D
and recently noncontact IR and RF-based technologies.x000D
The current electrical or optical humidity sensors have issues in terms of costs and technologies to providex000D
an economic environmental control service for detecting simultaneously in a large number of microclimatex000D
systems (various locations). For the electrical humidity sensors, high-quality probes are rather expensivex000D
(200-300$/each). They are not fast enough to accurately track the ambient relative humidity (RH) when itx000D
rapidly changes, such as in various manufacturing processes, as well as considering their limitation for thex000D
number of the probes and distance from the control unit. For the optical technologies, their humidity probes arex000D
also complicated, and often used an expensive detection system such as a spectrometer or interferometer.x000D
Our MHODS technology offers a cost-effective solution in comparison with current photonic basedx000D
approaches. We realize this using a photonic technology, through the use of multiple optical fibers with eachx000D
having a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor. Using the SPR probe and vapor condensation on a surface,x000D
we discovered a novel method to precisely sense moisture so that our transducer needs no moisture absorbentx000D
layer, in contrast to previously introduced approaches. The MODHS can provide humidity and dew pointx000D
monitoring service for a suite of microclimate systems in hard- to- access locations, industrials with hazardousx000D
chemicals, museums, archive rooms, libraries, laboratories, and etc.x000D
Also it enables us to use simple photoconductive cells or photodiodes for detection, instead to use expensivex000D
spectrometers. This is the reason why our photonic sensing platform will be inexpensive compared to otherx000D
technologies, and easy to commercialize thus justifying the proposed market study.