Portable Sensing of Organic Vapours based on a Single Semiconductor Sensor

A notable need for lightweight, simple-to-use portable gas analysers with facilities aimed at wide range of applications is observed in the market of measuring instruments today. In this work, a concept of portable sensing of organic vapours is presented. As the most reliable, the semiconductor gas sensor technology was chosen. However, due to high power consumption of this kind of sensors only a single sensor option is currently feasible for the portable device. In view of partial selectivity of the metal oxide based gas sensors, the unsatisfactory analytical abilities of the device could be anticipated. But, we showed that a single semiconductor gas sensor may be used for identification and quantification of the organic compounds vapours. In our solution, this goal is accomplished by applying active gas sampling. It was demonstrated that variable exposure conditions of a sensor, which are induced by the gas flow, allow for obtaining the sensor signal that has high information content. It is sufficient to characterize the test gases qualitatively and quantitatively. The achieved accuracy is very good for a screening device.

[1]  B. Reedy,et al.  Temperature modulation in semiconductor gas sensing , 1999 .

[2]  Charles P. Friedman,et al.  Evaluation as a Field , 1997 .

[3]  I. Elmi,et al.  Adaptive K-NN for the detection of air pollutants with a sensor array , 2004, IEEE Sensors Journal.

[4]  N. Bârsan,et al.  Micromachined metal oxide gas sensors: opportunities to improve sensor performance , 2001 .

[5]  Kea-Tiong Tang,et al.  A Portable Electronic Nose Based on Bio‐Chemical Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Array with Multiplexed Oscillator and Readout Electronics , 2009 .

[6]  Kengo Shimanoe,et al.  Basic approach to the transducer function of oxide semiconductor gas sensors , 2011 .

[7]  Kengo Shimanoe,et al.  New perspectives of gas sensor technology , 2009 .

[8]  Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna,et al.  A portable electronic nose based on embedded PC technology and GNU/Linux: hardware, software and applications , 2002 .

[9]  A. Szczurek,et al.  Method of gas mixtures discrimination based on sensor array, temporal response and data driven approach. , 2011, Talanta.

[10]  L. Conner,et al.  Evaluation of field sampling techniques including electronic noses and a dynamic headspace sampler for use in fire investigations , 2006 .

[11]  Monika Maciejewska,et al.  Sensor array and stop-flow mode applied to discrimination and quantification of gas mixtures , 2010 .

[12]  J. Suehle,et al.  Microhotplate Platforms for Chemical Sensor Research , 2001 .

[13]  Satoshi Nakata,et al.  Non-linear dynamic responses of a semiconductor gas sensor: Evaluation of kinetic parameters and competition effect on the sensor response , 2001 .

[14]  Bartosz Krawczyk,et al.  VOCs classification based on the committee of classifiers coupled with single sensor signals , 2013 .

[15]  Lalita Udpa,et al.  Artificial intelligence methods for selection of an optimized sensor array for identification of volatile organic compounds , 2001 .