Imagine that a pipeline that stretches for miles and miles springs a leak. Traditionally, this would mean many miles of walking for someone tasked with finding the hole. In an ideal world, this search for the precise point of methanol leakage could also be performed by a drone, onto which a spectrometer has been mounted that specializes in analysing chemical samples. Existing devices are currently far too heavy; the drone would soon have to give up. Lisa-Marie Faller is working on a technology, with which the fitted spectrometers can be made much smaller and would therefore be suitable for this type of deployment, amongst others. In recognition of her work, the doctoral student received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Conference EuroSimE in Dresden in April.

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