Category Archives: Publications

COS Reviews; Junction and carrier temperature measurements in deep-ultraviolet light-emitting diodes using three different methods

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LED photo

The Cranfield Optics Society (COS) was setup to enable its members to develop the skills and attributes required by researchers. To that end we regularly meet and discuss papers that are relevant to the work we do, and analyse them as a group. The papers are discussed on their clarity, their relevance to our work and their accuracy. Presenting research in the context of a paper is tricky; you strive to make the paper as accurate to the research you undertook while making it as brief as possible. You want it to be unambiguous and to allow others to replicate Continue reading →

Gas sensing review article

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Janes paper wordle

The review article I (Jane) put together with Ralph Tatam on optical gas sensing has just been published online by the journal Measurement Science and Technology. You may remember this review from my previous blog post on the problems with journal copyright. Optical gas detection is a wide reaching field that impacts on industry, environmental study and safety.  Given this importance the field moves rapidly with a large number of groups working with a diverse range of techniques. Our paper seeks to highlight the changes in this field over the last 10 years and provide a detailed analysis of their Continue reading →

Artistically linked research

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Not a Hedgehog

Last week I read an excellent blog post by Johanna Kieniewicz on PLOS.org about the combination of art and science. The post details why blending art and science is important and how it can be highly productive for both groups. I am not very artistic (as my previous drawings demonstrate) but I enjoy exploring some of the more aesthetically pleasing areas of my work. Before coming to Cranfield I worked briefly as a consultant for an artist and it was very enlightening look at differing perspectives on the products of science. Reading the article at PLOS not only reminded me of Continue reading →

Journal copyright for figures – why it takes aaaaages

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Wrapped in IEEE brand tape

Some time ago now, in a weak moment, Ralph and I agreed to write a review article on optical gas sensing for the journal Measurement Science and Technology, an IoP journal. This is a huge field and to do it justice we have written a rather large article with over 400 citations and 60 figures. It has been through peer review and is reaching the final stages of preparation, one of which is to get copyright permission to reproduce images from other peoples’ publications. Standard practice is that the authors have to do this, ie me. A review article is essentially Continue reading →

Latest publication in Sensors and Actuators B

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optical fibre with mesoporous coating

Our latest paper, published in Sensors and Actuators B, describes a highly sensitive device for detecting and quantifying the concentration of carboxylic acid. The work is part of an on-going collaboration between the Department of Engineering Photonics at Cranfield University  and The Graduate School of Environmental Engineering at the University of Kitakyushu, Japan, exploiting optical fibre based sensing platforms developed at Cranfield with the novel functional materials and coating techniques investigated by Prof Lee’s group at Kitakyushu. The operation of the sensor is based on the measurement of the change in refractive index of a functional coating deposited onto the Continue reading →

Gas sensing paper appears online

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Simple diagram of an Integrating sphere

Jane Hodgkinson’s latest study on the use of integrating spheres in wavelength modulation spectroscopy has appeared on Applied Physics B‘s “online first service” The detection and quantification of gas concentrations by measurement of their optical absorption has considerable great scientific and commercial importance. Extending the optical pathlength in gas sample cells is of interest to improve the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of this technique. Integrating spheres have great promise as multipass gas cells that require minimal optical alignment. However, the exponential distribution of optical pathlengths might be expected to influence the measurement. In the paper it was found that Continue reading →

Paper published in Thin Solid Films

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A comparison of a calix[4]resorcinarene monolayer with (bottom) and without (top) surfactant

The latest output from the collaboration between us physicists and those chemist in Cranfield Health has appeared in print in the journal Thin Solid Films. The best bits of the paper are summarised below. Calixarenes are bucket-like molecules that have been put to use in a number of approaches in sensors. By altering the active groups that are presented in  the calixarene, they can be made specific to certain agents.  The molecules have been proposed for applications ranging from uranium recovery, thorough VOC sensing to ion-selective sensing. This paper explores the properties of a number of calix-4-resorcinarenes along with their Continue reading →