The proposed research will be carried out at the Division of Environmental and Process Analytics at the Institute of Chemical Technologies and Analytics (Vienna University of Technology -TUWIEN-) with support and supervision of Prof. Bernhard Lendl (Laboratory of Chemical Analysis and Vibrational Spectroscopy).

The group has a wide background on vibrational spectroscopy and, at this institute, the principles of mid-infrared fibre optical evanescent wave sensing have been developed in the early nineties under the guidance of Prof. Kellner and constantly refined with the help of national and EU research grants.  Active on-campus cooperation with the institute for Sensor and Actuator Systems (Prof. Vellekoop, Faculty of Electronics) and the research group on ultrasound sensors (Prof. Benes, Faculty of Physics) ensures an ideal research environment for the development and testing of the planned new sensor systems.

Equipment available at these co-operation beneficiaries includes: Optical photolithography; UV mask aligners: Suss MJB 3 (3-inch) and Suss MA 150 (4-inch) for single-side lithography and a EVG AL 6 for double-side lithography; ECVD (plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition); STS 315 PC and for RIE (reactive ion etching) a STS 320 PC (The plasma etcher was upgraded in-house to set up a process for deep anisotropic etching of silicon); Metallization: two Balzers evaporation machines; Photoresist processing; Hamatech photoresist processing station; For coating of non-flat surfaces an EVG 101 spray coater is used.