You … shall not … pass inspection!

The Lord of the Rings shares a precious few commonalities with the contemporary workforce. The journey that Frodo, Gandalf, and the rest of the fellowship undertook to the fiery mouth of Mount Doom to cast the one ring into the flames and rid Middle-Earth of an ancient evil, for example, may well extend beyond the rigors of your nine-to-five and day-to-day.

At the same time, invisible — though less overt — threats to our industrial workforce loom large. No one wants to find a leaky pipe in a worksite or manufacturing plant releasing dangerous chemicals in the form of aerosolized clouds into the surrounding air. Such a situation poses a health risk to everyone in the area.

Courtesy of Greg Rieker.

But what if there were a device, perhaps one oddly reminiscent of the “dark lord,” that could detect the noxious fumes before the emergence of a threat? What if such a high-fantasy mechanism could alert the appropriate response teams?

Funny you should ask.

A fellowship of engineers and chemists from the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), Caltech, University of California, Santa Barbara, and a trio of companies have come together to create a laser-based device the size of a small suitcase to analyze potential gas clouds before they can become dangerous. The ironically named SAURON, which stands for Standoff Aerosol measUrement Remote Optical Network, would be placed on top of towers in reminiscence
of the iconic flaming eye.

Instead of serving as a hindrance to advancing hobbits, the network aims to deliver life-saving capabilities. The system uses frequency comb lasers, which parse through aerosol clouds, finding trace amounts of particles and detecting chemicals that pose health risks, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, ammonium nitrate, and fentanyl. The effort is funded by a multimillion-dollar contract from the federal office of the director of national intelligence.

According to principal investigator and professor of mechanical engineering at CU Boulder Greg Rieker, the SAURON system contrasts other devices of the same name, in that it runs on batteries rather than a dark, arcane power. This means that the engineered system will be able to be integrated in well-trod and infrastructure-crowded areas, such as airports, city blocks, and industrial sites.

Embarking on their own great journey, the researchers hope to make their lasers even more sensitive and compact through the development of integrated photonic chips, in collaboration with companies Nexus Photonics and hQphotonics.

In the meantime, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to see whether the system could be fine-tuned to find physical objects such as, maybe, a gold ring of power or other items that people might find, in a word, precious …