Nano sensors to improve thermal imaging
Cantilevers bend like tiny diving boards in response to a variety of stimuli.
DB: Panos Datskos has developed a tiny sensor – typically made of silicon coated with gold – that he says could soon make infrared cameras much better.
JB: They’d be used, for example, to sharpen the images from infrared cameras used by firefighters to see through smoke and find people. Datskos speaks of these sensors as “cantilevers.”
Panos Datskos: Cantilevers are small structures that fall into a category called microelectromechanical systems or nanoelectromechanical systems. They have very small dimensions — much smaller than the thickness of a human hair. And they can respond to a variety of stimuli — pressure, heat, temperature and so on.
DB: Datskos, who’s with Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, said that when the cantilever interacts with heat, it bends like a diving board. Put millions of them together, and you can make a very clear image of an object based on the heat it gives off.
Panos Datskos: The power of the cantilevers is that you have large numbers of them in a very small area, from a hundred thousand cantilevers to a few million cantilevers.
JB: Datkos went on to say, the more cantilevers, the better the image resolution. And for today, that’s our show. We have more on nanotech innovation at our website at earthsky.org. With thanks to the National Science Foundation, we’re Block and Byrd for Earth & Sky.
Panos Datskos told Earth & Sky, “Heat sensing is very important and very interesting because every object around us gives off heat and is able to detect that heat enables us to see that object and be able to tell things about it.”
He added, “So, the more cantilevers you have the higher spatial resolution you can have; what this means, is basically, the difference between a regular TV and a high definition TV. The more cantilevers you have, the more high definition TV equivalent you will have. And that’s important because when you look at the heat of an object and you want to image and see the edges of the object, how the object looks like, you need to have lots of pixels or lots of cantilevers. That’s the beauty of them. They are so small. You can have lots of them in a very small area.”
Panos Datskos co–authored an article called Microsensors & Macrosensitivity, which explains more about nanostructured microcantilever devices.
And here’s another somewhat technical aritcle that explains more about this technology: Nanoelectromechanical Devices
Our thanks to:
Dr. Panos Datskos
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
