History

History and scientific background

EMISENS was founded in 2007 as a spin-off from Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany, the largest interdisciplinary research centre in Germany (www.fz-juelich.de).

The inventor of this technology and initiator of EMISENS, Prof. Norbert Klein, currently holds a position as Chair in Electromagnetic Materials at the prestigious Imperial College London (www.imperial.ac.uk).  His research activities are about microwave-to-terahertz material characterization and sensing.  Within Imperial College London, Prof. Klein is director of the recently founded “Centre of Terahertz Science and Engineering”, a new UK facility pursuing benchmark research in the area of electromagnetic sensing with focus on security and biomedical applications.

Together with EMISENS’s partners and major shareholders  Link Microtek ltd in the UK (www.linkmicrotek.com) and GLOBES Electronic GmbH&CoKG in Germany, EMISENS develops, manufactures,  and commercializes sensor products based on the patented microwave evanescent field sensor technology.

EMISENS products are modular assemblies of a multimodal evanescent field resonator, a tailored high-frequency analogue electronic module providing functionality and performance comparable to  state-of-art  microwave network analyzers,  a fast data analysis software, a database containing characteristic properties of a large variety of materials, and a user interface which accommodates with the demands of non-microwave experts and commercial users.

The current dual-mode resonator technology allows to distinguish liquids and solid substances according to their dielectric constant, their molecular relaxation and their ionic or electronic conductivity.  For liquids, the analysis is based on the extended Debye equation,

which enables fingerprint detection for a variety of classes of liquids (see example), as well as highly sensitive concentration measurements  for mixtures.  The four material parameters in the modified Debye equation  e_s(static dielectric constant),  e_∞ (square of optical refractive index),  t  (molecular relaxation time) and  s (ionic conductivity)  can be determined from complex impedance measurements at two well separated frequencies within less than one second per sample. This extremely high speed, in combination with high selectivity and high sensitivity, makes the EMISENS technology unique among all competing  methods for material analysis and detection.