Tiny sensor wins place in awards finals

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jun 2, 2008

Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award seeks to demonstrate the importance of engineering and the role of engineers and scientists in contribution to national prosperity and internal prestige.

Owlstone has been selected as one of four finalists for the 2008 Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award.

HRH the Duke of Edinburgh will present a GBP 50,000 prize and the gold award medal to the winner of this year's competition at the Academy Awards Dinner in London on June 9th, 2008.

The MacRobert award recognises the successful development of innovative ideas in engineering.

The academy seeks to demonstrate the importance of engineering and the role of engineers and scientists in contribution to national prosperity and internal prestige.

"Our technology enables unprecedented miniaturisation of sensors with superior analytical capability, the ability to be programmed and reprogrammed to detect a wide range of substances and high selectivity and sensitivity", said Andrew Koehl, founder of Owlstone and original inventor of its core technology.

"Our commercial opportunity is enormous given the need for new and innovative deployment scenarios in chemical detection for homeland security, industrial process control, environmental and healthcare markets".

"We are deeply honoured to be chosen as a finalist candidate for the prestigious MacRobert Award and are proud to be recognised among the three highly regarded companies that have also achieved 2008 finalist status, The Automation Partnership, Johnson Matthey and Touch Bionics".

Owlstone has developed a silicon chip that can detect chemicals in the air.

What once required a large enclosure and connected apparatus has been reduced down to a fingernail sized silicon chip that can detect a wide variety of chemicals in real time from virtually any location.

The system can then be connected to a wireless communication system to send back real-time results to a command station.

Owlstone's FAIMS technology offers the flexibility to provide rapid alerts and detailed sample analysis with reduced flow and improved ion drive over current conventional technology.

The performances of existing systems, which largely use conventional Ion mobility spectrometry, worsen dramatically as they are reduced in size.

By contrast, the Owlstone FAIMS solution has improved sensitivity and improved selectivity at reduced power as it is miniaturised.

The small size of the Owlstone sensor enables a highly integrated system with the necessary electronic and mechanical components squeezed into a compact footprint.

Micro and nano-fabrication techniques enable the sensor to be manufactured in a massively parallel fashion, achieving a small form factor and reduced unit cost.

Unlike alternate miniature detectors, Owlstone's technology does not rely on exotic materials, custom engineered for each application, which often degrade over time.

The Owlstone technology is easily customised to each application through software updates and can be dynamically reprogrammed for new chemicals even after deployment.

Use of chemically inert materials ensures a long operational and storage life.

The Owlstone detector was conceived by Andrew Koehl, who began the development of Owlstone's fundamental technology in 2001 at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) with further development at Cambridge University, England.

Koehl is the inventor of the microchip spectrometer technology, the core of the Owlstone technology.

That technology was developed further as he was later joined by Billy Boyle, a researcher in the Microsystems and Nanotech group at Cambridge University responsible for the design and development of the silicon-opto hybrid devices for next generation telecom systems and David Ruiz-Alonso, a Cambridge University PhD in superconductor modelling.

Owlstone's proprietary and established FAIMS technology has now been incorporated within Lonestar, a new generation of analysis instrumention offering the flexibility to provide both rapid alerts and detailed sample analysis.

Lonestar can be trained to respond to a broad range of chemical scenarios and is easily integrated with other sensors and third-party systems to provide a complete monitoring solution.

This makes Lonestar suited to a range of applications, from online process monitoring to laboratory based R and D.