In this work, a new generation of gas sensing systems specially designed for breath analysis is presented. The developed system comprises a compact modular, low volume, temperature-controlled sensing chamber with three compartments that can host different sensor types. In the presented system, one compartment contains an array of 8 analog MOX sensors and the other two 10 digital MOX sensors each. Here, we test the system for the detection of low concentrations of several compounds.
In the last seven years, many earth observation satellites from national agencies and commercial providers have been launched, making huge volumes of data freely available to anyone. Open-access software and cloud computing tools also have been developed by the earth observation community. Those, as well as new sensors and vectors such as drone-borne hyperspectral cameras or gas-sensing systems are opening a number of applications for the oil and gas industry in exploration, production, and environmental monitoring.
ZnO is worth evaluating for chemical sensing due to its outstanding physical and chemical properties. We report the fabrication and study of the gas sensing properties of ZnO nanomaterial for the detection of hydrogen sulfide (H2S). This prepared material exhibited a 7400 gas sensing response when exposed to 30 ppm of H2S in air. In addition, the structure showed a high selectivity towards H2S against other reducing gases. The high sensing performance of the structure was attributed to its nanoscale size, morphology and the disparity in the sensing mechanism between the H2S and other reducing gases. We suggest that the work reported here including the simplicity of device fabrication is a significant step toward the application of ZnO nanomaterials in chemical gas sensing systems for the real-time detection of H2S.
A Novel Modular System for Breath Analysis Using Temperature Modulated MOX Sensors
