Gamingdeputy reported on April 16 that according to the Hefei Institute of Physical Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently, Wang Han and other researchers from the Institute of Intelligence researcher Chen Chilai’s team have made new breakthroughs in the field of deep-sea exploration:
Based on previous deep-sea mass spectrometry research,Increase the detection sensitivity of dissolved methane in water by more than 500 timesreaching the detection level of background dissolved methane in oceans and lakes, and realizing the leap from monitoring of abnormal dissolved methane events to long-term monitoring of background methane.
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The relevant technology has applied for national invention patents, and the research results have been published in internationally renowned analytical chemistry journals,District 1 Top Journal Talanta.
According to reports, methane is the second largest greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, and its emissions have an important impact on global climate change.Methane emissions from aquatic ecosystems such as oceans and lakes account for approximately 53% of the global total every year.therefore, it is crucial to effectively monitor the emission flux of oceanic methane into the atmosphere.
In addition, methane is also the main component of natural gas hydrate. This new clean energy is regarded as one of the most promising energy sources in the 21st century. Therefore, marine methane monitoring is of great value for marine environment perception, discovery of methane anomaly areas, marine energy exploration, marine scientific research, etc.
Due to the low and large variability of methane concentration in the ocean, there are still very few detection data of dissolved methane in the ocean, and there is still great uncertainty in the estimation of ocean methane flux.Deep-sea mass spectrometer is an important marine equipment for rapid detection of ocean dissolved gas. Due to its limited detection sensitivity, it can only detect specific areas or abnormal events..
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Researcher Chen Chilai's team has long been committed to the research of deep-sea mass spectrometry, MEMS technology and MEMS mass spectrometry and other intelligent microsystem technologies. With the support of related projects and the Deep Sea Intelligent Sensing Technology Joint Laboratory (co-constructed by the Hefei Institute of Materials Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Deep Sea Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences), in 2023, the team jointly developed a deep sea mass spectrometer (named Zhiwei Deep Sea Underwater Mass Spectrometer , ims-UMS), and successfully completed multiple sea trials in a certain area of the South China Sea, obtaining important dissolved gas information on the ocean profile.
Based on the previous work, in order to further improve the detection sensitivity, the team developed a small-volume, low-power online water removal system to address issues such as high water vapor in the sample and limited space for the detection instrument. At the same time, the team optimized the design of the sampling gas path and successfully It is integrated and installed in the Zhiwei deep-sea mass spectrometer. This improvement maintains high permeation flux of the target detection gas,Improve the vacuum degree of the mass spectrometer by more than 2 orders of magnitude, and reduce the detection limit of methane from more than 16 nmol/L to 0.03 nmol/L, an increase of more than 500 timesreaching the level of methane background signal detection in waters such as deep seas and lakes, and is expected to achieve undifferentiated monitoring of ocean dissolved methane.
It is understood that the next step of the research team will be based on this technology to carry out in-situ detection of background methane in a large space and a wide time range, as well as H2Research on in-situ detection of directional extremely low concentration gases such as , He and other directional gases.This research work provides an important technical basis for further realization of methane flux calculation, global climate research, plume tracing, cold seep discovery, etc..
Relevant work has been funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Class A pilot project “Deep Sea/Abyssal Intelligent Technology and Seabed In-situ Scientific Experiment Station” and other projects. Gamingdeputy inquired and learned that Dr. Wang Han is the first author of the article and researcher Chen Chilai is the corresponding author.