A portable embedded toxic gas detection device based on a cross-responsive sensor array

There is an obvious pressing need for the rapid, sensitive and highly portable identification of toxic gases. In this study, a battery-operated, low-cost and portable embedded gas detection device is fabricated with ARM9 S3C2440A core as the main application processor. And a quite simple and effective cross-responsive sensor array is utilized here for toxic gases detection based on cross-reactive recognition mechanism. This device shows how the discriminatory capacity of sensor arrays utilizing pattern recognition operating in environments. It collects images of chemical sensors before and after exposing to the target gas, and then processes those images to extract the unique characteristic for each gas. The gas chamber model was optimized by simulating with FLUENT software, to ensure a sufficiently reaction between toxic gases and cross-responsive sensor arrays. Then five toxic gases were detected by the proposed device and experiments showed the validity of the system for the qualitative and quantitative identification of toxic gases. It has shown successful classification of the five toxic gases by HCA and PCA analysis at ppb level. Importantly, this developed equipment provides a potential method for the qualitative and quantitative identification of toxic gases. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.