Kinetic detection of benzene/chloroform and toluene/chloroform vapors using a single quartz piezoelectric crystal coated with calix[6]arene Original Research Article

A single piezoelectric quartz crystal microbalance modified with p-tert-butyl-calix[6]arene (CA[6]) is employed to detect volatile organic vapors in a flow analysis system. The adsorption and desorption kinetic characteristics of such a coating are studied. The results show that desorption of chloroform was different from benzene and toluene, the former showing a longer desorption time than benzene or toluene. Taking advantage of such differences and combined with a well-defined flow analysis system, the detection of binary mixture vapors (benzene/chloroform and toluene/chloroform) are achieved. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are used to handle the data. The average relative errors for a benzene/chloroform mixture are 4.9 and 2.3%, respectively, and for toluene/chloroform are 2.0 and 2.2%, respectively.