ANI has developed a sensor based on a microresonator effect that measures methane and hydrogen concentrations up to 100% with excellent linearity and accuracy of 0.25% full scale and overcomes the problems with existing approaches.    

Existing leak detection devices rely upon several known technologies.  The most widely used technology utilizes metal oxide-based sensors.  One advantage of this technology is its relative simplicity and high sensitivity in the ppm concentration range.   However, metal oxide sensors have many disadvantages:    

• They saturate when concentrations exceed ~1%,
• They require oxygen and measurement is oxygen concentration dependent, 
• They require heating up to 200°C-400°C, making this technology not intrinsically safe, and unstable (calibration drift). 
• They are cross-sensitive to many other hydrocarbons, they are not selective.

Catalytic bead-based sensors also require high temperature operation.   Electrochemical sensors usually suffer from the limited operation temperature range (typically, up to 40°C), limited lifetime, and strong dependence of the sensor response on humidity levels.    

Infrared (IR) based sensors are bulky, expensive and cross- sensitive to other hydrocarbons.