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 micro-resistance 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.