Volatile Sensing
✨ Volatile Sensing
The need to detect specific gases is critical across a wide range of industries, including breath analysis for disease diagnosis, hazardous waste identification and classification, food spoilage detection, air quality monitoring and more. The most accurate measurements require bulky, expensive equipment such as infrared spectroscopy, gas chromatography, and mass spectroscopy. These typically require trained personnel and, for many applications, necessitate off-site analysis. Meanwhile, although portable sensors are employed in practice, they tend to either be useful for only a specific subset of analytes (e.g., personal toxic gas safety monitors) or respond nondiscriminately to a range of analytes (e.g., chemiresistive sensors). Most of these are also unable to discern complex mixtures of components.
We take inspiration from Nature, which has produced a versatile and powerful chemical sensor: even the human nose can distinguish numerous odors at concentrations as low as 0.2 parts per billion. Our work is to progressively apply bio-inspired principles to enhance the sensing capabilities of artificial sensors. These include implementing sniffing, geometries and fluid dynamics to augment differences between different molecules, and machine learning to act as the 'brain' to discern different compounds.
