Abstract
Rapid, real-time, and non-invasive identification of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and gases is an increasingly relevant field, with applications in areas such as healthcare, agriculture, or industry. Ideal characteristics of VOC and gas sensing devices used for artificial olfaction include portability and affordability, low power consumption, fast response, high selectivity, and sensitivity. Microfluidics meets all these requirements and allows for in situ operation and small sample amounts, providing many advantages compared to conventional methods using sophisticated apparatus such as gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. This review covers the work accomplished so far regarding microfluidic devices for gas sensing and artificial olfaction. Systems utilizing electrical and optical transduction, as well as several system designs engineered throughout the years are summarized, and future perspectives in the field are discussed.
Highlights
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) can be defined as a family of carbon-containing chemicals that exhibit high vapor pressure at ambient temperature [1]
VOCs are predominant in urbanized areas as they are released from industrial processes, transportation activities, residences or natural resources [1]
Production of specific sets of VOCs is associated with food spoilage, and VOC monitoring can be a means for food quality control [7,8,9,10,11]
Summary
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) can be defined as a family of carbon-containing chemicals that exhibit high vapor pressure at ambient temperature [1]. Microfluidics refers to the study of fluids at the submillimeter scale, making use of channels with dimensions of tens to hundreds of micrometers, geometrically confined in small-scale chips This emerging technology has numerous advantages such as the ability to utilize small quantities of reagents and samples, precisely control experimental conditions, and perform multiplexed processes in an automated and high-throughput manner, resulting in miniaturized devices with high resolution and sensitivity of analysis, low fabrication and operation costs, short analysis time, and able of in situ operation [34,35]. Transparency, and non-toxicity, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is usually the material of choice to fabricate microfluidic chip devices, with the help of different microfabrication techniques such as photolithography, soft-lithography, and micro-milling [36] These allow for the design of customized microchannel geometries and for the integration of different stages of sample manipulation in compact devices. The present review will hopefully provide a starting point for future work regarding VOC and gas sensing using microfluidics
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