Validation of methane optical gas sensors in a dairy farm environment****

瓦拉克塔是魁北克-大西洋公司的牛奶生产专业中心。该公司的目标是提高该行业的可出租性和可持续性。他们制定了牛奶生产的几个技术经济方面的建议，为奶牛场提供建议。Valacta收集数据和分析样本，为乳制品生产商提供基准和决策工具。收集了许多指标，如食物分析、牛奶分析、奶牛的生物标志物以及未来的环境指标。对于最后一类，瓦斯监测缺乏廉价和实时的解决方案。目前，气体传感器主要是价格昂贵的红外气体传感器或非选择性的电子式气体传感器。许多气体在奶牛养殖场中扮演着重要的角色，比如氨对奶牛的健康，二氧化碳和甲烷对工业和动物生产力的环境影响。Valacta需要一种廉价、实时和精确的解决方案来监测奶牛场的甲烷。蒙特雷亚尔理工学院的微光子学实验室之前开发了一种芯片上的光学气体传感器。该项目旨在为我们的光学气体传感器在恶劣的奶牛场环境中开发一种封装。

Valacta is the expertise center in milk production for Québec-Atlantic. The company aims to increase rentability and sustainability of this industry. They developed several technico-economic aspects of milk production to advise dairy farms. Valacta collects data and analyzes samples for benchmarking and decision tool for dairy producer. Many metrics are collected like food analysis, milk analysis, cow's biological markers and in the future environment metrics. For the last category, gas monitoring lack of a cheap and real-time solution. Presently, gas sensors are mainly infrared gas sensors that are expensive or electronic gas sensors which are not selective. Many gases play a role in a dairy farm like ammonia for cow's health or carbon dioxide and methane for environmental impacts of the industry and animal productivity. Valacta needs a cheap, real-time and precise solution for methane monitoring in dairy farms. The Microphotonics Laboratory at Polytechnique Montréal developed previously an optical gas sensor on chip. This project is aimed at the development of a packaging for our optical gas sensor in a rough dairy farm environment.