Detection and Discrimination Capabilities of a Multitransducer Single-Chip Gas Sensor System

Abstract

The performance of a single-chip, three-transducer, complementary metal oxide semiconductor gas sensor microsystem has been thoroughly evaluated. The monolithic gas sensor system includes three polymer-coated transducers, a mass-sensitive cantilever, a thermoelectric calorimetric sensor, and an interdigitated capacitive sensor that are integrated along with all electronic circuits needed to operate these sensors. The system additionally includes a temperature sensor and a serial interface unit so that it can be directly connected to, for example, a microcontroller. Several multitransducer chips have been coated with various partially selective polymers and then have been exposed to different volatile organic compounds. The sensitivities of the three different polymer-coated transducers to defined sets of gaseous analytes have been determined. The obtained sensitivity values have then been normalized with regard to the partition coefficients of the respective analyte/polymer combination to reveal the transducer-specific effects. The results of this investigation show that the three different transducers respond to fundamentally different molecular properties, such as the analyte molecular mass (mass-sensitive), its dielectric coefficient (capacitive), and its sorption heat (calorimetric) so that correlations between the determined sensitivity values and the different molecular properties of the absorbed analytes could be established. The information as provided by the system, hence, represents a body of orthogonal data that can serve as input to appropriate signal processing and pattern recognition techniques to address issues such as the quantification of analytes in mixtures.

Characterization of the sorption of gaseous and organic solutes onto polydimethyl siloxane solid-phase microextraction surfaces using the Abraham model

“…The increased number of total points is due to the fact that we had both a "wet" and "dry" log K PDMS-water value for trichloromethane (log K PDMS-water (wet) = 1.71 [37] and log K PDMS-water (dry) = 1.62 [35]) and trichloroethylene (log K PDMS-water (wet) = 2.41 [38] and log K PDMS-water (dry) = 2.24 [21]). Figure 2 compares the calculated values of log K PDMS-water based on Eq.…”

Multidimensional colorimetric sensor array for discrimination of proteins

“…Generally, the multidimensional transduction devices were mainly classified two categories. Several different transducers with optical, mass-sensitive, and capacitive properties were designed by mechanically incorporating on a single-chip microsensor system (GutierrezOsuna and Hierlemann, 2010;Hagleitner et al, 2001;Jin et al, 2008;Kurzawski et al, 2006). However, the assembly of such multidimensional sensor requires circuit design, semiconductor chip fabrication and packaging.…”

The Use of Different Transduction Principles for Qualitative and Quantitative Chiral Gas Analysis

“…The multitransducer system has been described in detail earlier (9,34) so that we only include little information here: It comprises three polymer-coated transducers, a capacitive, a mass-sensitive and a calorimetric transducer along with all necessary front-end and signal conditioning circuitry on a 7 by 7 mm 2 CMOS chip (9,(35)(36)(37).…”