The development of an electronic ‘nose’ for industrial and environmental applications

Abstract

The electronic nose detailed in this paper deals entirely with a conducting polymer sensor system. This works on the principle of 12 different sensors monitoring a complex vapour in the headspace above a sample. The ability of any system to mimic the human nose depends primarily on the sensor characteristics. Therefore, most of the development work has been on the sensor materials and the fabrication process. The range of sensors described exhibits significantly different responses to most vapours tested. Therefore, it has been shown using 12 of these sensors that very good discrimination can be achieved between very similar samples over a wide range of products. The complete system is easy to use in the laboratory, and software has been developed to enable the complex data to be analysed and presented in a simple summary form.