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, anti-terrorism, 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, which is based on a single metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) sensor radiated by ultrasound. The identification is based on different ultrasonic effects on the stable 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.