New sensing material can detect toxic gases from your smartphone
Posted on: 29/Aug/2016 10:11:14 AM
Researchers from the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, have developed a new low-cost sensing material that can be integrated in electronic circuits and can enable smartphones to detect toxic gases within seconds. They have developed the chemical sensing material whose electrical conductivity dramatically increases when exposed to toxic gases. The research was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The researchers integrated the sensing material into the electronic circuit in a near-field communication, or NFC, tag, which is embedded in smart cards like those used to get through train ticket gates. This technology made it possible for smartphones to quickly, about five seconds, detect toxic gases at a low concentration, around 10 parts per million.
Say the researchers, People in today`s society are subject to risks of being exposed to toxic gases deriving from natural sources, such as volcanic gases, leak accidents or potential acts of terrorism. Means to easily and quickly detect toxic gases are vital to minimize their harmful effect. The currently available toxic gas sensors are expensive, bulky, heavy and difficult to operate, and it is not practical to set them at many public locations, for example subways, or for people to carry them around. The supramolecular polymers were designed so that weakly bound sites in the molecules are dissociated when these sites are exposed to toxic gases, causing the wrapping molecules to disassemble. As a result, the original high conductive state of CNTs is restored. We created a toxic gas sensor whose measurement can be read on smartphones by integrating the chemical sensing material into the electronic circuit present in a commercially available NFC tag. Users can readily determine the presence/absence of toxic gas by holding an NFC-compatible smartphone over a sensor-embedded NFC tag while making sure that communication between the two devices is intact.
