Methane & Hydrogen Sensor Platform
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.
Operating Princile
- Micro-resonance effect
- Temperature stabilized oscillators
- Compensated solid state sensor

Platform Advantages
- Low cost, even in small scale production
- Sensor and controller can be very small
- Nothing is heated above 50°C
- No chemistry or radiation involved
- Does not require a sampling system
- Does not require oxygen
- Accuracy ±0.25% of full scale
- No consumables required
- Almost instant response, less than 1 sec
Applications
- LEL/LFL and UEL/UFL gas monitors
- Leak detection
- Analytical measurements
- Pipeline backfill monitoring
- Binary mixture sensing
- Custom applications