MIRICO

Partner Description

MIRICO is pioneering the development of a new generation of instruments that deliver highly accurate and sensitive gas monitoring solutions capable of operating in a variety of environments. MIRICO’s products and services deliver unique sensing capabilities across a wide range of gases, concentrations and deployment scenarios. For scientific communities, our instruments provide accurate and traceable measurements fulfilling the high standards required by scientific research infrastructure. MIRICO  stemmed and inherit from ~15 years of cutting edge scientific research conducted by the by the Laser Spectroscopy Team at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory’s Space Science and Technology department (RAL Space), a division within STFC.

Role in the Project

MIRICO will work with S4CE partners towards the development, the deployment, and the exploitation of MIRICO’s sensing technologies to enable clean energy applications. Monitoring systems are to be deployed and operated at the S4CE identified well sites, to accurately quantify emissions of important greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane and contribute to the understanding of emission processes and pathways.

MIRICO’s proprietary Laser Dispersion Spectroscopy (LDS) is a new approach for gas sensing with unique distinctive features and opens up new possibilities in field-based chemical sensing. Unlike the well-known and widely used absorption spectroscopy approach, LDS relies on the measurement of tiny variations of refractive index related to molecular absorption to infer concentrations. The measurement approach is differential and interferometric to extract the molecular concentration information encoded in the phase of the optical field rather than the amplitude. As a results, baseline free signals are recorded, resulting in unprecedented performance in terms of sensitivity and selectivity, well suited for demanding applications involving complex gas mixtures. Most importantly, LDS leverage the benefits of phase sensing including 1) enhanced immunity to variations in detected light intensity that may arise form varying environmental conditions such as soot, rain, snow, etc; 2) linearity enabling sensing dynamic range up to >5 order of magnitude, well suited to resolve highly variable seeps for instance.

Another proprietary sensing approach to be involved in the S4CE project is MIRICO’s Laser Isotope Ratiometer, LIR, for stable isotope analysis. The LIR concept was originally breadboarded for space mission proof of concept, and focuses on portability and robustness to enable in-situ, real-time, field deployable stable isotope analysis with laboratory grade precision.

MIRICO’s core expertise is the design, development and manufacture of high performance chemical analysers, with a primary focus on gases. MIRICO’s products compelling commercial advantage is achieved through the delivery of compact and robust instrument suitable for field deployment, whilst maintaining laboratory standard precision and accuracy. As part of S4CE, MIRICO is engineering innovative sensing principles to deliver solutions suitable for the demanding applications in atmospheric & geosciences.