I-Corps Teams: Customer Discovery Activity for Microelectromechanical Systems based Gas Sensors

I-Corps 团队：基于气体传感器的微机电系统的客户发现活动

• 批准号: 1644894
• 负责人: Ahalapitiya Jayatissa
• 金额: $ 5万
• 依托单位: University of Toledo
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-08-15 至 2017-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1644894&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Corps; Teams; Customer; Discovery; Activity

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is: it presents a market ready gas sensor system to monitor hazardous and industrial gas leakages such as chlorine and ammonia. Although detection of industrial gases is critical from technical, safety and environmental perspectives, there is a need for a straightforward technology to detect such industrial gas leakages on site. This team's portable gas sensor system will potentially satisfy this need. If successful, the proposed sensor system has potential applications in diverse fields such as: bleaching industries involving food, clothes and papers, agriculture, defense, and others.This I-Corps project focuses on a micro-sized gas sensor system to detect leakage of industrial gases. This sensor system consists of nanoscale metal-oxide layer which will be made using a nanocomposite of graphene and metal oxides. Such composites have attractive properties such as low resistance and high active surface-area, which are important to enhance the performance of gas sensors. Also, this composite layer can be optimized for fast sensor response and enhanced selectivity for a particular gas. The low resistance of a sensor layer will allow designing of low impedance peripheral circuits while high active surface-area will allow fast response and improved selectivity of sensors. The sensors can be designed to reduce power consumption by reducing operation temperatures with integration of micromachined resistive heaters and catalyst layers. The sensor properties can be optimized for different gases at ambient conditions. The ability to integrate signal transfer by wireless technique will also be investigated for this sensor system.

该 I-Corps 项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力是：它提供了一个市场就绪的气体传感器系统，用于监测危险气体和工业气体泄漏，例如氯气和氨气。尽管从技术、安全和环境角度来看，工业气体的检测至关重要，但仍需要一种简单的技术来现场检测此类工业气体泄漏。 该团队的便携式气体传感器系统将有可能满足这一需求。 如果成功，所提出的传感器系统将在多个领域具有潜在的应用，例如：涉及食品、服装和纸张的漂白行业、农业、国防等。该 I-Corps 项目专注于微型气体传感器系统，用于检测泄漏工业气体。该传感器系统由纳米级金属氧化物层组成，该层将使用石墨烯和金属氧化物的纳米复合材料制成。此类复合材料具有低电阻和高活性表面积等有吸引力的特性，这对于提高气体传感器的性能非常重要。此外，该复合层可以进行优化，以实现快速传感器响应并增强对特定气体的选择性。传感器层的低电阻将允许设计低阻抗外围电路，而高活性表面积将允许快速响应并提高传感器的选择性。这些传感器可通过集成微机械电阻加热器和催化剂层来降低工作温度，从而降低功耗。传感器特性可以针对环境条件下的不同气体进行优化。该传感器系统还将研究通过无线技术集成信号传输的能力。