PHANTOM is a three-year, EFRO Oost-funded project that aims to develop a modular photonic platform for gas sensing. The consortium is led by Bronkhorst High-Tech and comprises 10 partners: Aluvia, High Tech NL, One Planet/IMEC, Radboud University, Sensor Sense, Saxion, VSL and VTEC and Epiphany Design. The project aims to build a standardized “plug & play” system of Basic Building Blocks: tunable lasers, photonic spirals (miniaturized gas cells fabricated in AlOx with low propagation loss), conventional gas cells, and open-path measurement setups.
The goal is to make gas sensors be assembled cost-efficiently and reproducibly for a wide range of applications, cutting costs by a factor of 5–10 versus current systems (e.g. gas chromatographs) while improving accuracy, speed and reliability.
Four application domains are targeted: agriculture/livestock (ammonia, methane, CO₂, HCN, relevant to the nitrogen crisis), green energy & combustion (hydrogen, ammonia, NOx, biogas quality), fruit storage (ethylene, CO₂, MCP to reduce spoilage), and industry (flow sensors, semiconductor process gases).
Epiphany’s contribution
Epiphany brings to this project its expertise in photonic design. We are simulating and designing photonic spirals (working closely with Saxion’s lab test results to iteratively improve transmission efficiency and yield in the AlOx platform), and the visible-wavelength lasers (440 nm and 655 nm) together with Aluvia, which handles fabrication.
The project is cofinanced by the European Union/medegefinanceerd door dde Europese Unie. Its purpose is to create a smarter path forward for gas sensing by combining precision, modularity, and scalability in a single platform.
