Gas Identification by a Single Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Sensor Assisted by Ultrasound

The gas identification technology has huge potential applications in medical diagnoses, food industries, early warning of poisonous gas leakage, fire prevention, antiterrorism, military, etc. Although electronic noses may be used to identify different gases, it has been a big challenge to identify gases by a single sensor. In this work, we demonstrate a novel gas identification strategy based on a single metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) sensor assisted by an ultrasound. The identification is based on different ultrasonic effects on the steady sensing responses of an ultrasonically radiated MOS gas sensor to different target gases. It does not need a complicated feature extraction computation. Our experiments show that the success rate of identification can be up to 100% if strong enough ultrasound is employed. The identification process can also give the concentration of the gas to be identified. The identification result is immune to the interference of impurity gases to some extent. The anti-interference capability may be strengthened by increasing the vibration velocity and choosing proper sensing materials.