The story

Motivation

Gasera was founded to provide solutions to the drawbacks of conventional gas analysis techniques, namely non-linearity, lack of sensitivity and complicated usability.

The solution was to use the photoacoustic principle. The inherent linearity and the direct absorption measurement makes the photoacoustic principle ideal for versatile gas analysis. This was discovered by physics professor Jyrki Kauppinen in the early nineties. However, at that time the prior art of photoacoustics sensors was limited by sensitivity and lack of temperature and pressure immunity.

"Everything can be solved with interferometers"

Jyrki Kauppinen - Gasera

Gasera's superior technology originates from interferometry which has been under Prof. Kauppinen's research since the early seventies.

The break through was made in 2001 when professor Kauppinen, invented the silicon cantilever sensor with optical interferometric readout. This system could be made virtually immune to temperature variations and the sensitivity was increased to over 100 times more sensitive than the prior art. Furthermore, these inventions enable photoacoustic gas measurements at elevated temperatures (up to 200 Celsius) first time ever.

He built his first high resolution FTIR spectrometer at the University of Oulu in Finland. This spectrometer was the fifth highest resolution FTIR instrument in the world when it started to record spectra in 1971. Later professor Kauppinen modified the interferometer by introducing cube-corner mirrors. The modified cube-corner interferometer achieved the resolution of 0.001 1/cm, which is still the highest practical resolution.

Gasera - FTIR Spectrometer

At the University of Turku in Finland Prof. Kauppinen has built a new cube-corner interferometer with a resolution of 0.0004 1/cm. Further, Kauppinen has produced infrared wavenumber standards and studied a lot of rotation-vibration spectra of molecules with his high resolution interferometer. He has developed the gauge measuring interferometer for the Finnish standard of length, low-resolution stationary interferometers (without moving parts), small, very stable low resolution interferometers (for IR, NIR, VIS, and UV) and the treatment of experimental data by various sophistical mathematical methods such as resolution enhancement using Fourier Self-Deconvolution and the extrapolation of signals.

From the lab to the market

The quest for commerzilizing the life work and innovations of spectroscopy began in late 2004 when Gasera Ltd. was founded. Currently Gasera employs seventeen highly educated specialists from the areas of physics, chemistry and business.