A novel, low-cost, portable PID sensor for the detection of volatile organic compounds

Abstract

We report on the design, fabrication and verification of a portable, low cost PID. Unlike commercial PID sensors, ours provides two outputs. One output correlates to the total chemical components and a second that provides some level of compositional information. We believe that this makes this sensor system more useful than a standard commercial PID, at a similar cost point. Our PID sensor was tested with gas concentrations down to 2 ppm isobutylene. The results presented indicate that the limit of detection will be well below 1 ppm. Compositional analysis was also carried out and the results presented shows our sensor can successfully discriminate between low concentrations of 2-hexanone, isobutylene, propanol, 2-pentanone, 2-octanone and 2-heptanone.