Compact Gas Sensor Using Ellipsoidal Reflectors
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Solution Overview
Problem
Compact gas sensors face challenges in maximizing light path length within limited enclosures, necessitating optimization for enhanced detection sensitivity while maintaining compatibility with industrial formats.
Innovation Solution
The design incorporates an enclosure with ellipsoidal reflective surfaces that successively reflect light waves, increasing the path length and focusing them onto a measuring photodetector, thereby enhancing sensitivity, and includes a reference photodetector for non-attenuated light to determine gas composition using the Beer-Lambert law.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Volume of moving object
If the enclosure size is reduced to achieve compactness, then the device becomes more compact and compatible with industrial formats, but the light path length decreases reducing detection sensitivity
Solution Approach 1:
The patent employs ellipsoidal reflective surfaces instead of flat walls to redirect and focus light rays. The ellipsoidal geometry naturally concentrates light paths through its curved reflective properties, enabling extended optical paths within a compact enclosure volume. This resolves the contradiction by using curved surfaces to maximize light path length without increasing the overall device volume.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces multiple reflective surfaces arranged in a specific geometric configuration that creates complex light paths through successive reflections. By utilizing three-dimensional spatial arrangement of ellipsoidal surfaces, the system extends the effective light path length in multiple directions simultaneously, achieving enhanced detection sensitivity within a compact volume.
2Measurement precision
If multiple reflective surfaces are added to increase light path length, then detection sensitivity improves, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The ellipsoidal reflective surfaces serve multiple functions simultaneously: they redirect light rays, focus them onto the photodetector, and define the optical path geometry. This multi-functionality reduces the need for additional separate optical components, thereby limiting the increase in device complexity while achieving enhanced detection sensitivity through the geometric configuration alone.
Applied Scientific Principles
This section explains which scientific principles are used to turn an abstract innovation direction into a practical engineering solution.
Function Achieved in This Case
This configuration allows for improved detection sensitivity and accuracy in determining gas concentrations, even in compact formats, by increasing the light path length and minimizing signal losses, facilitating better quantification of gas species like methane and carbon dioxide.
Implementation Method 1
the first wall and the second wall each comprise at least one reflective surface, forming a portion of an ellipsoid of revolution... the light wave emitted by the light source is successively reflected by the N ellipsoidal-of-revolution reflective surfaces
Implementation Method 2
Sensors allow the composition of a gas to be determined based on the fact that the species from which a gas is composed have spectral absorption properties that are different from one another... the concentration of a gaseous species present in the medium to be estimated
Implementation Method 3
a reference photodetector configured to detect a light wave considered to be not attenuated by the gas
Data Source
AI summary
A gas sensor comprises an enclosure configured to receive a gas. The enclosure comprises a sidewall extending, around a transverse axis, between a first wall and a second wall. The sensor also comprises a light source configured to emit a light wave that propagates in the enclosure and forms, from the light source, a first light cone. A measuring photodetector is configured to detect the light wave emitted by the light source and propagated through the enclosure. The first wall and the second wall each comprise at least one reflective surface, forming a portion of an ellipsoid of revolution. Each reflective surface is associated with a rank n, n being an integer greater than or equal to 1.