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Gas Sensors: Materials, Mechanism and Applications

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Chemical Sensors".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 July 2024) | Viewed by 12687

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems, UPR 8001, Toulouse, France
Interests: micro and nanoelectronics; nanoenergetic materials; metals; oxides; semiconductors; surfaces and interfaces; defects and diffusion multiscale modeling (TCAD) from atomic scale calculations to macroscopic simulations
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Guest Editor
LAAS-CNRS, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, INP, 6 AllÃée Emile Monso, 31400 Toulouse, France
Interests: gas sensors; semiconducting metal oxides; density functional theory; surface chemistry

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Gas sensors with high sensitivity, excellent selectivity, good stability, probably low power consumption, low detection limits and low cost are a goal of most researchers in this field. As a type of chemical sensor, sensitive materials play key role in gas sensing performance in most cases, except for some optical gas sensors. Deepening our understanding of gas-sensing mechanisms is necessary to improve or optimize such sensors’ performance. Only with more reliable performance will gas sensors draw increased attention and be applied to different areas.

This Special Issue aims to collect research and review papers reporting on recent progress in materials utilized in different types of gas sensors, including novel synthesis methods, morphology control, doping and functionalization. New experimental and theoretical insights into gas sensing mechanisms are particularly welcome. Developments in applications of gas sensors also fall within the scope of this issue.

Dr. Anne Hémeryck
Dr. Tingqiang Yang
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • gas sensors
  • nanomaterials
  • semiconducting metal oxides
  • polymers
  • gas sensing mechanism
  • gas absorption
  • gas sensor applications

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Published Papers (8 papers)

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Research

Jump to: Review

20 pages, 3328 KiB  
Article
Microwave-Based State Diagnosis of Three-Way Catalysts: Impact Factors and Application Recommendations
by Carsten Steiner, Vladimir Malashchuk, David Kubinski, Gunter Hagen and Ralf Moos
Sensors 2024, 24(13), 4091; https://doi.org/10.3390/s24134091 - 24 Jun 2024
Viewed by 638
Abstract
This study reassesses an overview of the potential of the radio frequency (RF)-based state diagnostics of three-way catalysts (TWC) based on a previous study with an emphasis on the defect chemistry of the catalyst material during reoxidation and reduction. Some data are based [...] Read more.
This study reassesses an overview of the potential of the radio frequency (RF)-based state diagnostics of three-way catalysts (TWC) based on a previous study with an emphasis on the defect chemistry of the catalyst material during reoxidation and reduction. Some data are based on the previous works but are newly processed, and the signal parameters resonant frequency and inverse quality factor are evaluated with respect to applicability. The RF-based method uses electromagnetic resonances in a cavity resonator to provide information on the storage level of the oxygen storage component. The analysis focuses on a holistic investigation and evaluation of the major effects influencing the RF signal during operation. On the one hand, the response to the oxygen storage behavior and the resolution of the measurement method are considered. Therefore, this study merges original data from multiple former publications to provide a comprehensive insight into important measurement effects and their defect chemistry background. On the other hand, the most important cross-sensitivities are discussed and their impact during operation is evaluated. Additionally, the effect of catalyst aging is analyzed. The effects are presented separately for the two resonant parameters: resonant frequency and (unloaded) quality factor. Overall, the data suggest that the quality factor has a way higher signal quality at low temperatures (<400 °C) and the resonant frequency is primarily suitable for high operating temperatures. At most operating points, the quality factor is even more robust against interferences such as exhaust gas stoichiometry and water content. Correctly estimating the catalyst temperature is the most important factor for reliable results, which can be achieved by combining the information of both resonant signals. In the end, the data indicate that microwave-based state diagnosis is a powerful system for evaluating the oxygen storage level over the entire operating range of a TWC. As a research tool and in its application, the system can therefore contribute to the improvement of the emission control of future gasoline vehicles. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gas Sensors: Materials, Mechanism and Applications)
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11 pages, 2818 KiB  
Article
Minimum Detection Concentration of Hydrogen in Air Depending on Substrate Type and Design of the 3ω Sensor
by Dong-Wook Oh, Kwangu Kang and Jung-Hee Lee
Sensors 2023, 23(21), 9009; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23219009 - 6 Nov 2023
Viewed by 1435
Abstract
Hydrogen has emerged as a promising carbon-neutral fuel source, spurring research and development efforts to facilitate its widespread adoption. However, the safe handling of hydrogen requires precise leak detection sensors due to its low activation energy and explosive potential. Various detection methods exist, [...] Read more.
Hydrogen has emerged as a promising carbon-neutral fuel source, spurring research and development efforts to facilitate its widespread adoption. However, the safe handling of hydrogen requires precise leak detection sensors due to its low activation energy and explosive potential. Various detection methods exist, with thermal conductivity measurement being a prominent technique for quantifying hydrogen concentrations. However, challenges remain in achieving high measurement sensitivity at low hydrogen concentrations below 1% for thermal-conductivity-based hydrogen sensors. Recent research explores the 3ω method’s application for measuring hydrogen concentrations in ambient air, offering high spatial and temporal resolutions. This study aims to enhance hydrogen leak detection sensitivity using the 3ω method by conducting thermal analyses on sensor design variables. Factors including substrate material, type, and sensor geometry significantly impact the measurement sensitivity. Comparative evaluations consider the minimum detectable hydrogen concentration while accounting for the uncertainty of the 3ω signal. The proposed suspended-type 3ω sensor is capable of detecting hydrogen leaks in ambient air and provides real-time measurements that are ideal for monitoring hydrogen diffusion. This research serves to bridge the gap between precision and real-time monitoring of hydrogen leak detection, promising significant advancements in the related safety applications. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gas Sensors: Materials, Mechanism and Applications)
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9 pages, 2798 KiB  
Article
An Artificial Neural Network to Eliminate the Detrimental Spectral Shift on Mid-Infrared Gas Spectroscopy
by Sanghoon Chin, Jérôme Van Zaen, Séverine Denis, Enric Muntané, Stephan Schröder, Hans Martin, Laurent Balet and Steve Lecomte
Sensors 2023, 23(19), 8232; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23198232 - 3 Oct 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1187
Abstract
We demonstrate the successful implementation of an artificial neural network (ANN) to eliminate detrimental spectral shifts imposed in the measurement of laser absorption spectrometers (LASs). Since LASs rely on the analysis of the spectral characteristics of biological and chemical molecules, their accuracy and [...] Read more.
We demonstrate the successful implementation of an artificial neural network (ANN) to eliminate detrimental spectral shifts imposed in the measurement of laser absorption spectrometers (LASs). Since LASs rely on the analysis of the spectral characteristics of biological and chemical molecules, their accuracy and precision is especially prone to the presence of unwanted spectral shift in the measured molecular absorption spectrum over the reference spectrum. In this paper, an ANN was applied to a scanning grating-based mid-infrared trace gas sensing system, which suffers from temperature-induced spectral shifts. Using the HITRAN database, we generated synthetic gas absorbance spectra with random spectral shifts for training and validation. The ANN was trained with these synthetic spectra to identify the occurrence of spectral shifts. Our experimental verification unambiguously proves that such an ANN can be an excellent tool to accurately retrieve the gas concentration from imprecise or distorted spectra of gas absorption. Due to the global shift of the measured gas absorption spectrum, the accuracy of the retrieved gas concentration using a typical least-mean-squares fitting algorithm was considerably degraded by 40.3%. However, when the gas concentration of the same measurement dataset was predicted by the proposed multilayer perceptron network, the sensing accuracy significantly improved by reducing the error to less than ±1% while preserving the sensing sensitivity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gas Sensors: Materials, Mechanism and Applications)
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14 pages, 5712 KiB  
Article
Resistive, Temperature-Independent Metal Oxide Gas Sensor for Detecting the Oxygen Stoichiometry (Air-Fuel Ratio) of Lean Engine Exhaust Gases
by Carsten Steiner, Simon Püls, Murat Bektas, Andreas Müller, Gunter Hagen and Ralf Moos
Sensors 2023, 23(8), 3914; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23083914 - 12 Apr 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2054
Abstract
This study presents a resistive sensor concept based on Barium Iron Tantalate (BFT) to measure the oxygen stoichiometry in exhaust gases of combustion processes. The BFT sensor film was deposited on the substrate by the Powder Aerosol Deposition (PAD) method. In initial laboratory [...] Read more.
This study presents a resistive sensor concept based on Barium Iron Tantalate (BFT) to measure the oxygen stoichiometry in exhaust gases of combustion processes. The BFT sensor film was deposited on the substrate by the Powder Aerosol Deposition (PAD) method. In initial laboratory experiments, the sensitivity to pO2 in the gas phase was analyzed. The results agree with the defect chemical model of BFT materials that suggests the formation of holes h by filling oxygen vacancies VO in the lattice at higher oxygen partial pressures pO2. The sensor signal was found to be sufficiently accurate and to have low time constants with changing oxygen stoichiometry. Further investigations on reproducibility and cross-sensitivities to typical exhaust gas species (CO2, H2O, CO, NO, …) confirmed a robust sensor signal that was hardly affected by other gas components. The sensor concept was also tested in real engine exhausts for the first time. The experimental data showed that the air-fuel ratio can be monitored by measuring the resistance of the sensor element, including partial and full-load operation modes. Furthermore, no signs of inactivation or aging during the test cycles were observed for the sensor film. Overall, a promising first data set was obtained in engine exhausts and therefore the BFT system is a possible cost-effective alternative concept to existing commercial sensors in the future. Moreover, the integration of other sensitive films for multi-gas sensor purposes might be an attractive field for future studies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gas Sensors: Materials, Mechanism and Applications)
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13 pages, 1275 KiB  
Article
Kinetics of Chemisorption on the Surface of Nanodispersed SnO2–PdOx and Selective Determination of CO and H2 in Air
by Alexey Vasiliev, Alexey Shaposhnik, Pavel Moskalev and Oleg Kul
Sensors 2023, 23(7), 3730; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23073730 - 4 Apr 2023
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1440
Abstract
In this work, the kinetics and mechanisms of the interaction of carbon monoxide and hydrogen with the surface of a nanosized SnO2–PdOx metal oxide material in air is studied. Non-stationary temperature regimes make it possible to better identify the individual [...] Read more.
In this work, the kinetics and mechanisms of the interaction of carbon monoxide and hydrogen with the surface of a nanosized SnO2–PdOx metal oxide material in air is studied. Non-stationary temperature regimes make it possible to better identify the individual characteristics of target gases and increase the selectivity of the analysis. Recently, chemometric methods (PCA, PLS, ANN, etc.) are often used to interpret multidimensional data obtained in non-stationary temperature regimes, but the analytical solution of kinetic equations can be no less effective. In this regard, we studied the kinetics of the interaction of carbon monoxide and hydrogen with atmospheric oxygen on the surface of SnO2–PdOx using semiconductor metal oxide sensors under conditions as close as possible to classical gas analysis. An analysis of the influence of catalytic surface temperature on the mechanisms of chemisorption processes allowed us to correctly interpret and mathematically describe the electrophysical characteristics of the sensor in the selective determination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen under nonstationary temperature conditions. The reaction mechanism is applied as well to the analysis of the operation scheme of the CO sensor TGS 2442 of Figaro Inc. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gas Sensors: Materials, Mechanism and Applications)
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14 pages, 43908 KiB  
Article
A Bio-Inspired Spiking Neural Network with Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning for Gas Recognition
by Dexuan Huo, Jilin Zhang, Xinyu Dai, Pingping Zhang, Shumin Zhang, Xiao Yang, Jiachuang Wang, Mengwei Liu, Xuhui Sun and Hong Chen
Sensors 2023, 23(5), 2433; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23052433 - 22 Feb 2023
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 2517
Abstract
The sensitivity and selectivity profiles of gas sensors are always changed by sensor drifting, sensor aging, and the surroundings (e.g., temperature and humidity changes), which lead to a serious decline in gas recognition accuracy or even invalidation. To address this issue, the practical [...] Read more.
The sensitivity and selectivity profiles of gas sensors are always changed by sensor drifting, sensor aging, and the surroundings (e.g., temperature and humidity changes), which lead to a serious decline in gas recognition accuracy or even invalidation. To address this issue, the practical solution is to retrain the network to maintain performance, leveraging its rapid, incremental online learning capacity. In this paper, we develop a bio-inspired spiking neural network (SNN) to recognize nine types of flammable and toxic gases, which supports few-shot class-incremental learning, and can be retrained quickly with a new gas at a low accuracy cost. Compared with gas recognition approaches such as support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), principal component analysis (PCA) +SVM, PCA+KNN, and artificial neural network (ANN), our network achieves the highest accuracy of 98.75% in five-fold cross-validation for identifying nine types of gases, each with five different concentrations. In particular, the proposed network has a 5.09% higher accuracy than that of other gas recognition algorithms, which validates its robustness and effectiveness for real-life fire scenarios. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gas Sensors: Materials, Mechanism and Applications)
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Review

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35 pages, 4465 KiB  
Review
A Review of Gas Sensors for CO2 Based on Copper Oxides and Their Derivatives
by Christian Maier, Larissa Egger, Anton Köck and Klaus Reichmann
Sensors 2024, 24(17), 5469; https://doi.org/10.3390/s24175469 - 23 Aug 2024
Viewed by 862
Abstract
Buildings worldwide are becoming more thermally insulated, and air circulation is being reduced to a minimum. As a result, measuring indoor air quality is important to prevent harmful concentrations of various gases that can lead to safety risks and health problems. To measure [...] Read more.
Buildings worldwide are becoming more thermally insulated, and air circulation is being reduced to a minimum. As a result, measuring indoor air quality is important to prevent harmful concentrations of various gases that can lead to safety risks and health problems. To measure such gases, it is necessary to produce low-cost and low-power-consuming sensors. Researchers have been focusing on semiconducting metal oxide (SMOx) gas sensors that can be combined with intelligent technologies such as smart homes, smart phones or smart watches to enable gas sensing anywhere and at any time. As a type of SMOx, p-type gas sensors are promising candidates and have attracted more interest in recent years due to their excellent electrical properties and stability. This review paper gives a short overview of the main development of sensors based on copper oxides and their composites, highlighting their potential for detecting CO2 and the factors influencing their performance. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gas Sensors: Materials, Mechanism and Applications)
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29 pages, 6987 KiB  
Review
II–VI Semiconductor-Based Conductometric Gas Sensors: Is There a Future for These Sensors?
by Ghenadii Korotcenkov
Sensors 2024, 24(12), 3861; https://doi.org/10.3390/s24123861 - 14 Jun 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 667
Abstract
A review of the state of research in the development of conductometric gas sensors based on II–VI semiconductors is given. It was shown that II–VI compounds indeed have properties that are necessary for the development of highly efficient gas sensors. In this case, [...] Read more.
A review of the state of research in the development of conductometric gas sensors based on II–VI semiconductors is given. It was shown that II–VI compounds indeed have properties that are necessary for the development of highly efficient gas sensors. In this case, to achieve the required parameters, all approaches developed for metal oxides can be used. At the same time, during a detailed review, it was concluded that sensors based on II–VI compounds have no prospects for appearing on the gas sensor market. The main obstacle is the instability of the surface state, which leads to poor reproducibility of parameters and drift of sensor characteristics during operation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gas Sensors: Materials, Mechanism and Applications)
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