Abstract
Air quality around the globe is declining and public health is seriously threatened by indoor air pollution. Typically, indoor air pollutants are composed of a series of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are generally harmful to the human body, especially VOCs with low molecular weights (less than 100 Da). Moreover, in some situations, more than one type of VOC is present; thus, a device that can detect one or more VOCs simultaneously would be most beneficial. Here, we synthesized a sensor array with 4 units to detect 4 VOCs: acetone (unit 1), benzene (unit 2), methanol (unit 3) and formaldehyde (unit 4) simultaneously. All units were simultaneously exposed to 2.5 ppm of all four VOCs. The sensitivity of unit 1 was 14.67 for acetone and less than 2.54 for the other VOCs. The sensitivities of units 2, 3 and 4 to benzene, methanol and formaldehyde were 2 18.64, 20.98 and 17.26, respectively, and less than 4.01 for the other VOCs. These results indicated that the sensor array exhibited good selectivity and could be used for the real-time monitoring of indoor air quality. Thus, this device will be useful in situations requiring the simultaneous detection of multiple VOCs.
Highlights
It is an indisputable fact that volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are common air pollutants, are harmful to the human body[1,2,3]
Each unit of the array can be described as follows: Unit 1 was fabricated with Mater.a for acetone detection, unit 2 was fabricated with Mater.b for benzene detection, unit 3 was fabricated with Mater.m for methanol detection and unit 4 was fabricated with Mater.f for formaldehyde detection
The molecular imprinting technique (MIT) can modulate the selectivity of certain metal oxides, facilitating the fabrication of larger arrays containing more units to detect more VOCs at the same time. These findings present a new feasible method for applying Ag-doped LaFeO3 (ALFO) to many other varieties of gas sensors via the MIT
Summary
Air quality around the globe is declining and public health is seriously threatened by indoor air pollution. The array is capable of monitoring acetone, benzene, methanol and formaldehyde or any combination of these gases simultaneously Based on these results, using any gas molecule as a template, ALFO can be prepared as a sensor to detect the template molecule. We measured the sensitivity of the array to eight types of volatile analytes: acetone, formaldehyde, methanol, toluene, gasoline, ammonia, benzene and ethanol During these tests, the operating temperature and relative humidity were 125 °C and 45%, respectively (Supporting Information Figures S4 and S5). The sensitivity of the array to each analyte individually (Supporting Information Figure S6) and to mixtures of the target analytes (acetone, benzene, ethanol, formaldehyde or any combination thereof) and the interferents (Fig. 3) was tested systematically. Likewise, when the test mixture contained only benzene and the interferents, unit 2 showed a strong
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