Novel Spectral Imaging Instrumentation for Environmental Sensing in Extreme Environments.

This project aims to develop novel optoelectronic instrumentation, with a focus on hyperspectral imaging, to enable data collection in extreme environmental settings, such as those found at glaciers and volcanoes. In recent years there has been a significant uptake of field deployable hyperspectral imaging within a number of environmental monitoring fields, however, there still remains a considerable lack of low-cost field deployable technologies across more extreme environmental settings. Existing hyperspectral cameras available today can cost anywhere between £30,000 and £150,000, which severely limits their user base. This lack of affordable instrumentation presents a significant problem for the continued advancement of environmental monitoring, leading to a lack of data to inform our understanding of underlying processes in these more extreme environmental settings. However, the recent increase in the availability of low-cost consumer market technologies provides an exciting opportunity to revolutionise data acquisition methods in these fields. This research, therefore, aims to provide a significant improvement to current sensing technologies in these environments by introducing accessible low-cost, miniaturised alternatives to the currently existing monitoring methods. This will be accomplished with the completion of the following objectives;
Development and construction of a low-cost miniaturised hyperspectral imager from commercially available components that is capable of laboratory-based sensing applications. This will involve the development of novel software for imager operation, data analysis, and user input, as well as the appropriate selection of suitable commercial hardware components.
Building on this, the hyperspectral imager design will be ruggedized and adapted to allow for field-based deployment, with a particular focus on its successful adaptation to more extreme environments to improve the accessibility of hyperspectral sensing techniques in these domains. To implement this, further software developments will be required to allow it to function as a stand-alone device, and physical alterations to the device housing, e.g. Weather-proofing, will be required to make the set-up suitable for prolonged exposed deployments.
This ruggedized device will be deployed to a variety of extreme environment settings, such as southern Italy, and Iceland, for volcanic and glaciological settings respectively, allowing for the capture of valuable datasets, for example resolving key absorption features relevant to the interaction of radiation with snow/ice surfaces (mineral dust, black carbon etc.), which are highly relevant to melt and radiative transfer dynamics. The acquisition of these datasets provides an opportunity to demonstrate the abilities of these low-cost set-ups whilst also acquiring datasets that will yield novel process understanding in these environments.
Investigate the potential for further miniaturisation and drone deployment with the inclusion of smartphone technologies. The processing power afforded by state-of-the-art smartphone technologies could provide further novel improvements to low-cost, miniaturised data acquisition and would, therefore, be of substantial benefit to a wide range of monitoring applications. This project aims to look into the potential for integration of these components within low-cost hyperspectral imaging set-ups.
These low-cost hyperspectral imagers have considerable applicability to a variety of measurement applications, including extreme environment monitoring, point-of-care applications, and food quality inspection, therefore, there is considerable potential for future commercialisation. Furthermore, given the significant cost reductions associated with these technologies, these outputs are anticipated to be of significant impact in applied physics and/or metrology fields.