SBIR Phase I: Micro-Fabricated, Multi-Species, Highly Selevtive Integrated Gas Sensors Based on Absorption and Adsorption

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase-I project involves the design and fabrication of highly selective, fast response, miniaturized gas sensors using micro-fabrication techniques wherein the sensing response is related to lattice absorption as well as surface adsorption of a given species in conducting perovskite oxides. For gases such as H2O, O2, CO2, H2S, NOx, and SOX which are supplied or produced in power plants, selectivity of gas sensors is required. The currently used adsorption based gas sensors suffer from significant interference effects from co-existing species thereby reducing their selectivity for a given species of interest. This concept of a new sensor design will be investigated for many other industrially and environmentally important gaseous species by pairing them with proper sensing materials based on perovskite oxides. The broader impact of the work is to bring highly selective micro-sensors into application for accurate monitoring on gases used or produced in power plants or other industrial plants so that the online control of those gas species can be more effective and the overall process efficiency can be dramatically increased. Environmentally, air pollutants can be detected more accurately by highly selective gas sensors, and this will have an ever-increasing impact in the coming years on establishing a global climate control strategy.