Electronic nose based on multiple electrospinning nanofibers sensor array and application in gas classification
Chuanlai Zang, Hao‐Long Zhou, Kaijie Ma, Yasuo Yano, Shuowei Li, Hiroyasu Yamahara, Munetoshi Seki, Tetsuya Iizuka, Hitoshi Tabata
Abstract
To mimic the human olfactory system, an electronic nose (E-nose, also known as artificial olfactory) has been proposed based on a multiple gas sensor array and a pattern recognition algorithm. Detection of volatile organic components (VOCs) has many potential applications in breath analysis, food quality estimation, and indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring, etc. In this study, a facile single-needle electrospinning technology was applied to develop the four different semiconductor metal oxide (MOS) nanofibers sensor arrays (SnO 2 , CuO, In 2 O 3 and ZnO, respectively). The array shows a smooth surface and constant diameter of nanofiber (average of 150 nm) resulting in high sensitivity to multiple target analyte gases. Five human health related VOCs gases were measured by fabricated E-nose and different response patterns were obtained from four MOS nanofibers sensors. Combined with feature extraction from the response curves, a principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm was applied to reduce the dimension of feature matrix, Thus, the fabricated E-nose system successfully discriminated five different VOCs gases. Real-time and non-invasive gas monitoring by E-nose is very promising for application in human health monitoring, food monitoring, and other fields.