Motivation
Gasera is based on the life-work of Dr. Jyrki Kauppinen, a professor in the field of physics (currently retired). After building spectrometers for the purpose of studying materials, he realized that the same principle could be used to solve major global challenges and ultimately help people live longer and happier. His mission was set to finding the solution how to bring this technology so small and low cost, that it could be eventually utilized by every human being.
The answer was to use the photoacoustic principle. The inherent features of the photoacoustic spectroscopy makes it ideal for various demanding gas analysis applications and it holds the unique potential to be miniaturized without compromising the ultra high performance!
The tsory of Gasera company began when the son of Prof. Kauppinen founded the company to commersialise professors revolutionary innovation and to make sure that his mission becomes reality. This then became the mission of his son.
“Everything can be solved with interferometers”
In the early nineties Professor Kauppinen discovered the unleashed power of the photoacoustic principle. At that time, the prior art of photoacoustic sensors was limited by the lack of sensitivity and lack of temperature and pressure immunity. Relentless efforts finally resulted in the invention of “optical cantilever microphone” which could overcome all of the above mentioned drawbacks.
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 Prof. Kauppinen, invented the silicon cantilever sensor with optical interferometric readout. This system could be made virtually immune to temperature variations and the sensitivity was soon proven to be over 100 times more compared to the prior art. Furthermore, these inventions now enable photoacoustic gas measurements at elevated temperatures (up to 200 Celsius) first time ever.
Prof. Kauppinen built his first high resolution FTIR spectrometer at the University of Oulu, Finland. This spectrometer was the fifth highest resolution FTIR instrument in the world when it started to record spectra in 1971. Later Prof. 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 achieved.
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 sophisticated mathematical methods such as resolution enhancement using Fourier Self-Deconvolution and the extrapolation of signals.
From the lab to the market – ultimate performance gas analysis
The quest for commercializing the life work of Prof. Kauppinen and his innovations in the field of infrared spectroscopy began in late 2004 when Gasera Ltd. was founded by Prof. Kauppinen’s son who is currently the CEO of the company. Currently Gasera employs about thirty highly educated specialists from the areas of physics, chemistry, mechanics, electronics and business.
