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Research Activities

The research and development activites of Norsk Elektro Optikk AS (NEO) are focused on three main application and product areas, gas spectroscopy, pipeline inspection and spectral imaging. The gas spectroscopy part is the most commercially mature area while the pipeline inspection products are being introduced in the market and the hyperspectral imaging still is in a research and development phase.

Gas Spectroscopy

NEO's gas and dust monitors based on laser technology are well established in the market and are being marketed by our subsidiary NEO Monitors AS. Norsk Elektro Optikk and NEO Monitors as a group is the world leading supplier of gas monitors based on tuneable diode lasers (TDL) with the largest market share according to independent analysts. These monitors are used for continuous emission monitoring (CEM) and process control in aluminium smelters, waste incinerators, power plants, petro-chemical plants and many other industries

The research on gas and dust monitoring is currently focused on measuring new gases, new combination of gases, increased temperature and pressure ranges as well as general improvements of the instrument design. Parameters of priority for the instrument design are detection limits, time response, power consumption and size.

You can read more about gas and dust monitoring here.

Pipeline Inspection

We have had several development projects in co-operation with one of the major Norwegian oil companies in the field of pipeline inspection. The current project, Optopig, is the development of an electro optical system for internal inspection of natural gas pipelines. This system gives both images and 3D information of the inner surface of the pipeline.

Many of the natural gas pipelines in the North Sea has lengths exceeding 800 kilometres (500 miles) and an inspection run therefore results in huge amounts of data. It would take about one man-year to manually inspect one full 800 km long pipeline. Automatic anomaly detection in pipeline data is therefore an important reseach field for us. Current work on automatic data analysis has been performed in co-operation with a group at Stanford University.

You can read more about research in pipeline inspection here.

Spectral Imaging

One of our research areas where not only the products have to be developed, but where also the marked has to be developed is hyperspectral imaging. Hyperspectral imaging is the combination of digital imaging and spectroscopy where we depict an object with equipment able to discriminate different colors or combination of colors with a high accuracy. This instrumentation will also cover the near infra red (IR) wavelength range not visible to the human eye.

Being able to discriminate between light distribution from the different parts of the visible and infra red spectrum, makes it possible to detect different substances, - solid materials, fluids and gases. Applications for this can be found in environmental monitoring, forestry, agriculture, food quality control, industrial inspection, forensic science, homeland defence and military surveillance.

You can read more about research in the field of hyperspectral imaging here.