Abstract
Handheld gas sensing systems have drawn attentions recently for personal use and daily applications. However, commercially available gas detection devices are yet to satisfy the needs due to the challenging issues of system miniaturization, such as insufficient selectivity and sensitivity. In this chapter, we introduce an approach to achieve this goal. Based on an array of surface acoustive wave (SAW) gas sensors, a bio-inspired gas sensing system (also called electronic nose) could be realized to construct a robust system to identify gases. To increase the gas sensitivity, nanocomposites of polymers and ordered mesoporous carbons (OMCs) is introduced. The polymers are directly grown on the carbon material through a radical polymerization process, thus forming interpenetrating and inseparable composite frameworks with carbon. Furthermore, to reduce the system size and power consumption, the integrated circuits (IC) technology is adopted to implement the readout interface circuit to replace bulky instruments, such as frequency counter. Finally, several odor classification algorithms are introduced to perform gas classification. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.