University of New Mexico Center for MicroEngineered Materials

Seeking Postdoc for Development of Electrochemical Sensors for Methane Detection. Our group at University of New Mexico Center for Micro-Engineered Materials is pursuing a project for the monitoring of methane emissions from natural gas infrastructure and we are seeking a postdoc to work with us on this project. Beyond the loss of valuable product, methane leaked from natural gas represent a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and widely deployable sensor systems are needed for continuous monitoring. A complicating challenge is that natural gas infrastructure is often situated near other sources of methane emissions including agriculture and wetlands, making discrimination of a methane emission from natural gas difficult to identify without complex laboratory analytical techniques. Our objective is to develop low-cost field-deployable systems using mixed-potential solid-state electrochemical sensors which can quantify the rate of emissions, identify the source of the emission, and provide an early warning system so leaks can be found and repaired quickly. The approach will be cross disciplinary in chemical sensing, electrochemistry, additive manufacturing / 3D printing, machine learning, and data science.