Trace chemical detection in air using electronic noses and nano-structured sensing materials

摘要

For a variety of application areas, including homeland defense, environmental and health monitoring and emergency response, the detection of gas-phase chemicals is of great interest. One approach to these challenging sensing tasks is to use arrays of broadly selective chemical sensors as an electronic nose. In this presentation, we describe recent research at NIST, which employs multi-element microscale chemiresistor arrays populated with varied (chemically and morphologically) sensing materials. Furthermore, we modulate the operating temperature of the microsensors on millisecond timescales to enable increased selectivity for the detection of several volatile organic compounds in air at varied concentrations less than 100 μmol/mol.