A Santa Clarita company has received a $100,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to develop a sensor for detecting air pollutants. The electromechanical sensor would be the first product made by Waddan Systems for industrial and perhaps home use. Until now, the company has made sensors and other instruments for the defense sector, said founder and President Mahendra Singh. With the EPA grant, Singh hopes to have a prototype of the air pollutant sensor in about six months. “It has a global market,” he said. “We will be setting up a separate company that will concentrate on producing these.” The sensor, called the Multi Air Pollutant Lab-on-a-Chip, could be used anywhere from oil and gas refineries to homes. Singh estimates the device, which is about the size of a flash drive and powered by a watch battery, will cost about $200. Waddan, a six-employee company founded in 1988, will manufacture the sensor from silicon in a process similar to that used to make computer chips. What is different about its sensor, according to Singh, is the use of nanowires, silicon components that are smaller than a micron, or one-one-thousandth of a millimeter. Those nanowires will detect air pollutants; in other pollution meters, sensitive metal strips are used. Chemicals such as ozone, sulfur dioxide and volatile organic compounds will bind to the nanowires. The effect of those bonds on the nanowire will provide measurements of airborne pollutants, he said. Applications of the sensor include emissions monitoring in smokestacks and exhaust streams in chemical, pharmaceutical and power-generating plants and refineries; leak detection near machinery and processes with potentially hazardous emissions; and monitoring emission sources in and around industrial facilities. The sensors can be connected to a Wi-Fi network to allow for remote monitoring, Singh said. “You can put 100 of these things in different areas of a refinery and keep sending data to a central location tied to the Internet,” he added. Singh presented his air pollutant sensor idea to the EPA about a year ago and it went through a peer review before being chosen for the grant, part of the agency’s Small Business Innovation Research Program. Waddan was one of 19 companies in the United States and one of only two in Southern California to receive the phase-one innovation research grant. The company can apply for a $300,000 phase-two grant next year. “Southern California continues to experience poor air quality and is now faced with a historic drought,” said Jared Blumenfeld, EPA’s regional administrator for the Pacific Southwest, in a prepared statement. “These small businesses are singlehandedly working on new technologies to help find solutions to these environmental issues while strengthening the economy.” – Mark R. Madler