Authors:
Inês Pimentel Moreira
;
Laura Sato
;
Cláudia Alves
;
Susana Palma
and
Ana Cecília Roque
Affiliation:
UCIBIO, Chemistry Department, School of Science and Technology, NOVA University of Lisbon, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Gas-sensing, Electronic Nose, Fish Gelatin, Liquid Crystal, Ionic Liquid, Volatile Organic Compounds.
Abstract:
Electronic noses (e-noses) mimic the complex biological olfactory system, usually including an array of gas sensors to act as the olfactory receptors and a trained computer with signal-processing and pattern recognition tools as the brain. In this work, a new stimuli-responsive material is shown, consisting of self-assembled droplets of liquid crystal and ionic liquid stabilised within a fish gelatin matrix. These materials change their opto/electrical properties upon contact with volatile organic compounds (VOCs). By using an in-house developed e-nose, these new gas-sensing films yield characteristic optical signals for VOCs from different chemical classes. A support vector machine classifier was implemented based on 12 features of the signals. The results show that the films are excellent identifying hydrocarbon VOCs (toluene, heptane and hexane) (95% accuracy) but lower performance was found to other VOCs, resulting in an overall 60.4% accuracy. Even though they are not reusable,
these sustainable gas-sensing films are stable throughout time and reproducible, opening several opportunities for future optoelectronic devices and artificial olfaction systems.
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