Sensors 2005 started today with four day-long seminars. We attended one of them, Sensors for Manufacturing Efficiency. The seminar was organized by the Department of Energy and Gideon Varga chaired the sessions which served as an annual review of DoE sponsored companies and projects.
Most of the reported products focused on reducing energy consumption and improving manufacturing efficiencies by using sensors. For example, Wayne Manges from Oak Ridge National Laboratory spoke about a $14 million installation at a nuclear plant which resulted in significant savings for the plant. Most of the savings seem to come from reductions in wiring costs ($20-$2000 per foot!) , rapid sensor network deployment and easier maintenance. Wayne mentioned that there is a lot of opportunities both for sensor vendors to do business as well as companies and their plants to realize higher profits by using sensors to cut costs.
There were at least 3 or 4 other projects that used optical absorption schemes to do detection of temperature and composition. Why optical? Because these projects were geared for harsh environment applications such as steel furnaces.
There was also a uGC project from Honeywell and their collaborators at Univ. of Washington. The uGC uses a MEMS-based scheme. In addition to the uGC, another group from Honeywell presented on their wireless interface work. A wireless uGC is certainly needed, however, Honeywell's application does not seem to be quite ready for commercialization. Honeywell is not the only group working on the uGC -- the NSF-sponsored WIMS center at the Univ. of Michigan has a significant effort in this area.