OptoMole – The Award Winning Innovation That’s Helping To Find The Gas Leaks Under Our Streets

July 15, 2015 - PRLog -- Our gas networks are aging: as a result, gas utility companies are waging an ongoing battle to ensure that our gas infrastructure remains safe and continues to provide us with an uninterrupted supply to meet our demands for heating our homes and cooking our food. We tend to take for granted the vast network that connects these supplies to our houses and we don’t give much thought to the work that’s required to deliver this service on demand. Gas leaks from aging cast iron pipes are difficult to find and costly to repair, generally involving excavations, road closures and disruption to the public.

OptoMole has been developed to aid gas networks in finding these fugitive methane escapes and uses novel laser and fibre optic based detection techniques to carry out real-time profiling of gas concentrations in buried ducts or voids, indicating the likely location of the leaking gas main. The system has been developed in partnership with the UK Gas Distribution Networks and the Energy Innovation Centre (EIC) and has recently won the UK Energy Industry award for ‘Best Innovation Contributing to Quality and Reliability of Gas Supply.’

The system transmits a low power laser signal via a fibre optic cable to a compact sensor head which is passed through a buried service duct. Analysing the return laser signal allows OptoMole to instantly display the changing methane concentration in the duct, highlight the gas ingress points and direct the operator to the potential gas main leakage sites.

OptoMole speeds up the leak investigation process, reduces GDN costs and helps to mitigate the health and safety risk associated with leaking methane gas. In addition, OptoMole's all optical detection technique means that the sensor travelling through the duct is inherently safe with no risk of accidental spark ignition in a potentially explosive gas filled environment.

OptoSci Ltd. was founded in 1994 as a spin-off company from the University of Strathclyde with the key objective of incubating, developing & commercially exploiting selected innovative photonics technology arising from internal and academic research. OptoSci’s business strategy has proved very successful with over a decade of profitable growth and has led to the Company becoming a leading producer of innovative optoelectronic systems, components and instrumentation for the international education, research, industrial and environmental markets.

See http://www.optosniff.com for more information.