Polymer-Based Micro-Sensor Paired Arrays for the Determination of Primary Alcohol Vapors

An artificial olfactory system (or “electronic nose”) has been developed to investigate the interactions between polymer-modified sensors with odorant vapors from the headspace of primary alcohol samples. Complementary pairs of polymer-coated quartz crystal microbalance sensors and polymer/carbon black-coated microresistance sensors have been used to produce a characteristic value for the odorants (Sfr), related to the odorant molecular density, which can be used in electronic nose applications for odor discrimination. An application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is also described which controls and collects data from the quartz crystal microbalance-based sensors, enabling the future development of a hand-held/miniaturized detection system utilizing these types of sensor.