Smart Chemical Microsensors

摘要

Sensor technology is being revolutionized by advances in microelectronics and optoelectronics. The new sensors are demonstrating improvements in the operation, reliability, safety, and efficiency of many engineering systems. Perhaps the most familiar examples of this new technology for the average consumer are in the home CO monitor and the home blood glucose monitoring kits. A sensor is now almost always part of a data acquisition system. Because of the low cost of computers, microprocessors, analog to digital circuit boards and other peripherals, the concept of large arrays of distributed sensors is now commonplace. The sensor itself is often the weak link in such a system partly because the investment in sensor technology has been dwarfed by the efforts in computer technology. It is now possible to obtain, manipulate, graph, and act-on huge amounts of data, but is the data reliable? That will often depend mostly on the reliability of the sensor itself. The pervasiveness of inexpensive microprocessors has also freed sensor technology to exploit phenomena that do not give an absolutely linear response to a measurand, including logarithmic and other monotonic responses. In some commercial instruments the calibration curves for a large number of individual sensors are stored, so that the instrument "knows" the characteristics of each sensor sold and gives the correct values for the measurand One problem not solved by today's computer technology is a sensor output that is non-repeatable!