Transient response analysis for temperature-modulated chemoresistors

This article presents a sensor excitation and signal processing approach that combines temperature modulation and transient analysis to enhance the selectivity and sensitivity of metal-oxide gas sensors. A staircase waveform is applied to the sensor heater to extract transient information from multiple operating temperatures. Four different transient analysis techniques, Pade-Z-transform, multi-exponential transient spectroscopy (METS), window time slicing (WTS) and a novel ridge regression solution, are evaluated on the basis of their ability to improve the sensitivity and selectivity of the sensor array. The techniques are validated on two experimental databases containing serial dilutions and mixtures of organic solvents. Our results indicate that processing of the thermal transients significantly improves the sensitivity of metal-oxide chemoresistors when compared to the quasi-stationary temperature-modulated responses. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.