Facile sensors replacement in optical gas sensors array

Abstract

Sensors are the less durable parts in any chemical sensor system, then the replacement of sensors maintaining hardware and data processing is a necessity in real applications. Though sensors replacement requires a perfect reproducibility of the sensors fabrication. Among the different sensor technologies, those based on optical transduction may offer a straightforward methodology to release the requirement of identical sensor manufacturing. In particular it will be shown here that the use of image sensor provides a surprising parallel with natural olfaction. An important consequence is that the data processing is independent from the geometric arrangement of the sensitive layer. This feature leads to a simple sensor layer replacement and to a prompt arrangement of different sensor systems, even remotely located, into a single data processing system.