Recent Progress and Perspectives on Polyurethane Membranes in the Development of Gas Sensors

Abstract

In today’s technology, gas sensors are of great importance in areas such as assessing environmental impacts, monitoring gas production facilities, measuring natural gas, controlling mines and gas leaks. Improving sensor sensitivity and decreasing the determination time is among the subjects that are continuously investigated. The use of polymeric membranes to make such improvements is common practice in the gas sensor field. By the development of polymeric membrane-based gas sensors and increasing the measurement sensitivity, accurate, sensitive, precise and fast measurements of toxic gases, volatile organic gases, and trace gases have been possible. Therefore, polyurethane membranes have been promising in the development of next-generation gas sensors based on membrane diffusion to ensure real-time and continuous monitoring of gases in industry and academic studies. This study aims to evaluate, compare and discuss the recent developments in the use of polyurethane membranes in existing gas detection technologies with chemical, electrical and optical measurement methods. In these measurement methods, polyurethane structures act as a selectively permeable membrane, an ideal matrix material for conductive additives or a suitable film structure for coating the conductive polymeric films. Conductive additives or conductive film structures for gas sensors play an important role in the detection of the gas structure with the change in electrical properties during the passage of gas molecules. This review has focused on important properties such as selectivity, detection time and measurement sensitivity concerning gas detection technology containing polyurethane, which has been used so far.