Gas sensor arrays, better known as electronic noses, have the unique ability to replicate the biological sense of smell, but with far greater sensitivity, which is why they’re used for important medical research such as lung cancer detection. Recent studies have focused on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) as the primary sensing materials since they’re known for their impressive gas absorption qualities. However, there exists a great challenge in finding optimal combinations of materials with useful adsorption behaviors for detecting a wide variety of gases. University of Pittsburgh researchers have found a solution by demonstrating how to generate improved signals and diversity from changing not only the combination of MOFs, but the operating gas pressure of the device. By exploring the use of system pressure as a knob for controlling the adsorption behavior of MOFs, Pitt’s research demonstrated that by using only a single compressor, they could improve the cross-sensitivity and information content of current electronic noses, while also limiting the need to synthesize a large numbers of specialty materials.
Description
Pitt researchers studied 9 different metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and 4 different gas mixtures. They found that by lowering pressure, they could desaturate saturated MOFs, and by increasing pressure they could concentrate weakly adsorbing gases. In both cases, they noted improving detection with the resulting arrays. Their research showed that changing system pressure yielded more improvement to the resulting arrays than including more MOFS. The discovery demonstrates a new technique for increasing the information content and cross-sensitivity of electronic nose sensors, while limiting the number of unique sensing materials needed in the device.
Applications
• Detection of harmful bacteria
• Detection of lung cancer and other medical conditions
• Bomb odors
• Drug detection
• Environmental Monitoring
• Research and development laboratories
• Conducting breath biopsies
• Detecting toxic, hazardous situations humans may wish to avoid
• Metabolomics, how chemical breath patterns indicate illness
Advantages
• Nose design improves sensitivity and selectivity of current models
• Limits need to synthesize high amounts of specialty materials
• Substantially increases information content with single compressor
Invention Readiness
Design stage
IP Status
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2024026268A1
