An optoelectronic detector for aldehydes discrimination applications based on CD-like colorimetric chip

Abstract

A novel, rapid, and low-cost optoelectronic detector for aldehydes discrimination applications has been developed. A novel compact disc (CD)-like colorimetric chip based on amine nucleophile mechanism was designed. To ensure the gas molecules uniformly scattered around the chemical sensor elements in the chip, a rotary reaction chamber was designed. Consecutively, finite element calculation was applied to optimize the properties of the reaction chamber. The optical sensing subsystem was used to capture the changes of the chip before and after reaction in color space, and extracted the unique responsive patterns of analytes. 8 aldehydes were detected by the developed detection system, and the difference maps exhibited good selectivity in low concentration ranging from 50 ppb to 0.8 ppm. As demonstrated by machine learning algorithm (hierarchical cluster, principal component, and support vector machine), the detector could successfully classify aldehydes at ppb level. Importantly, this proposed detector provides a brilliant potential application for the industrial waste detection and environmental monitoring.