Expertise
& History
The instruments Nikira Labs builds today rest on work that started decades ago. Before founding the company, Dr. Manish Gupta helped commercialize cavity-enhanced spectroscopy at Los Gatos Research, growing it from an academic startup to an R&D 100 award winner acquired by ABB. Dr. J. Brian Leen directed research there, developing and field-deploying trace gas instruments aboard aircraft, land vehicles, and in the deep sea. This experience informs every analyzer we build today.
Product History
Water Vapor & Temperature Analyzer
Cloud boundaries move fast. Understanding how clouds grow and dissipate means measuring water vapor and temperature inside supersaturated regions at the millisecond timescale — which rules out any instrument that draws a sample through tubing, because the walls hold water and blur the signal. Nikira Labs built an open-path multi-pass TDLAS analyzer that measures both parameters in place, from first principles, with no memory effects. The prototype measured 30 × 17 × 20 cm, weighed 2.2 kg, and drew under 10 watts, delivering precision of ±15 ppm and ±0.24 K at 100 Hz. It has flown repeated vertical profiles aboard an unmanned aircraft. Under Phase II, four instruments are being built for DOE's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement facilities — a terrestrial flux station, the ArcticShark UAV, a Bombardier Challenger 850, and a tethered balloon.
Methane/Ethane Portable Analyzer
Aerosols are easy to weigh and hard to identify. Knowing particulate matter is present says little about what it's made of, and the methods that answer that question are slow, expensive, or too large to move. Nikira Labs' aerosol functional group analyzer measures composition directly, in real time, from a vehicle. It works in the mid-infrared fingerprint region, 7.6 to 10.4 μm, where the bonds that define organic chemistry absorb at characteristic frequencies. A quantum cascade laser is coupled to Nikira's non-paraxial multi-pass cell, folding the beam into over 300 meters of effective path length. That allows direct measurement of aerosol absorption at urban loadings of a few micrograms per cubic meter, in an open cell, on a moving platform.
Ethylene Oxide Analyzer
Ethylene oxide is a potent carcinogen regulated at parts-per-billion, and the standard EPA methods (TO-15/TO-15A) require capturing a sample in a canister and shipping it to a laboratory, a process that takes days or weeks and suffers cross-interference from other gases. Nikira Labs built a cavity-enhanced absorption analyzer that measures EtO in ambient air in real time instead, at precision better than 2 ppb in one second. Mounted in a vehicle, it detected and localized emissions downwind of a sterilization facility; paired with a sonic anemometer in stationary deployment, it resolved source direction. The work was published in Aerosol and Air Quality Research.
Methane/Ethane Portable Analyzer
The MEPA measures methane and ethane simultaneously using mid-IR cavity-enhanced absorption spectroscopy. Ethane is the discriminator: it is present in pipeline natural gas but absent from biogenic methane, so detecting both distinguishes a pipeline leak from a landfill or agricultural source. Vehicle-mountable with built-in GPS, the analyzer produced source-attribution maps across Mountain View, California, separating landfill emissions from pipeline emissions in the same survey.
Optical Ammonia Analyzer
The OAA measures ammonia at better than 1 ppb precision in one second. Ammonia is chemically sticky, it adsorbs readily onto surfaces, which makes it one of the harder trace gases to measure accurately, and a good demonstration of the sample handling problem the open-path approach addresses.
Semiconductor AMC Analyzer
Built to a specification set by a semiconductor manufacturer, these open-path analyzers measure ammonia, hydrogen fluoride, and hydrogen chloride at ppb levels while riding aboard FOUPs on overhead transport in an active fab. Open-path measurement eliminates carry-over and response delay; the units are battery-powered, WiFi-connected, and light enough to travel with the wafers they protect.
Portable Methane and CO₂ Analyzer
The Portable Methane Analyzer measured a single species. When soil flux work called for carbon dioxide alongside methane, the question was what adding a second gas would cost — in size, in weight, in performance on the original measurement.
The answer was nothing. The PMCA measures CO₂ in addition to CH₄ with methane precision and dynamic range unchanged from the PMA, in an enclosure of 9" x 6" x 3.5" weighing five pounds, still battery-powered and still field-portable. Adding a species meant selecting a wavelength and configuring the optics for it; the cavity, the enclosure, and the electronics carried over. That is the practical meaning of a platform — a new requirement becomes a configuration rather than a new instrument.
