Cheryl Margaret Surman

Materials and transducers toward selective wireless gas sensing.

Wireless sensors are devices in which sensing electronic transducers are spatially and galvanically separated from their associated readout/display components. The main benefits of wireless sensors, as compared to traditional tethered sensors, include the non-obtrusive nature of their installations, higher nodal densities, and lower installation costs without the need for extensive wiring.1–3 These attractive features of wireless sensors facilitate their development toward measurements of a wide range of physical, chemical, and biological parameters of interest. Examples of available wireless sensors include devices for sensing of pH, pressure, and temperature in medical, pharmaceutical, animal health, livestock condition, automotive, and other applications.4–7 Some implementations of wireless gas sensors can be already found in monitoring of analyte gases (e.g. carbon dioxide, water vapor, oxygen, combustibles) in relatively interference-free industrial and indoor environments.8,9 However, unobtrusive wireless gas sensors are urgently needed for many more diverse applications ranging from wearable sensors at the workplace, urban environment, and battlefield, to monitoring of containers with toxic industrial chemicals while in transit, to medical monitoring of hospitalized and in-house patients, to detection of food freshness in individual packages, and to distributed networked sensors over large areas (also known as wireless sensor networks, WSNs). Unfortunately, in these and numerous other practical applications, the available wireless gas sensors fall short of meeting emerging measurement needs in complex environments. In particular, existing wireless gas sensors cannot perform highly selective gas detection in the presence of high levels of interferences and cannot quantitate several components in gas mixtures. 1.1. Diversity Of Monitoring Needs Of Volatiles The monitoring of numerous gases of environmental, industrial, and homeland security concern is needed over the broad range of their regulated exposure concentrations. Figure 1 illustrates the relationships between several regulated exposure levels spanning several orders of magnitude of gas concentrations. Typical examples of concentrations of regulated exposure are presented in Table 110–14 for three groups of toxic volatiles such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), toxic industrial chemicals (TICs), and chemical warfare agents (CWAs). These examples demonstrate the need for gas sensing capabilities with broad measurement dynamic ranges to cover 2 – 4 orders of magnitude in gas concentrations. Figure 1 Examples of regulated vapor-exposure limits established by different organizations: GPL: General Population Limit, established by USACHPPM – U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventative Medicine; PEL: Permissible Exposure Limit, established ... Table 1 Examples of regulated concentration levels (in ppm by volume) from three representative classes of toxic gases: VOCs, TICs, and CWAs.10–14 Additional needs for detection of volatiles originate from medical diagnostics, food safety, process monitoring, and other areas.15–17 In those applications, the types and levels of detected volatiles can provide the needed information for further control actions.

Battery-free radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors for food quality and safety

Market demands for new sensors for food quality and safety stimulate the development of new sensing technologies that can provide an unobtrusive sensor form, battery-free operation, and minimal sensor cost. Intelligent labeling of food products to indicate and report their freshness and other conditions is one important possible application of such new sensors. This study applied passive (battery-free) radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors for the highly sensitive and selective detection of food freshness and bacterial growth. In these sensors, the electric field generated in the RFID sensor antenna extends from the plane of the RFID sensor and is affected by the ambient environment, providing the opportunity for sensing. This environment may be in the form of a food sample within the electric field of the sensing region or a sensing film deposited onto the sensor antenna. Examples of applications include monitoring of milk freshness, fish freshness, and bacterial growth in a solution. Unlike other food freshness monitoring approaches that require a thin film battery for operation of an RFID sensor and fabrication of custom-made sensors, the passive RFID sensing approach developed here combines the advantages of both battery-free and cost-effective sensor design and offers response selectivity that is impossible to achieve with other individual sensors.

Development of radio-frequency identification sensors based on organic electronic sensing materials for selective detection of toxic vapors

Selective vapor sensors are demonstrated that involve the combination of (1) organic electronic sensing materials with diverse response mechanisms to different vapors and (2) passive 13.56 MHz radio-frequency identification (RFID) sensors with multivariable signal transduction. Intrinsically conducting polymers such as poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) and polyaniline (PANI) were applied onto resonant antennas of RFID sensors. These sensing materials are attractive to facilitate the critical evaluation of our sensing concept because they exhibit only partial vapor selectivity and have well understood diverse vapor response mechanisms. The impedance spectra Z(f) of the RFID antennas were inductively acquired followed by spectral processing of their real Zre(f) and imaginary Zim(f) parts using principal components analysis. The typical measured 1σ noise levels in frequency and impedance magnitude measurements were 60 Hz and 0.025 Ω, respectively. These low noise levels and the high sensitivity of the resona...

Selective quantitation of vapors and their mixtures using individual passive multivariable RFID sensors

We demonstrate passive (battery-free) radio frequency identification (RFID) devices for selective and sensitive chemical vapor sensing in the presence of ambient interfering gases. We developed two approaches for RFID sensing (1) when a sensing material is applied onto the resonant antenna to alter its impedance response and (2) when a complementary sensor is attached across an antenna and an integrated circuit (IC) memory chip to alter the impedance response of the sensor. In both approaches, these RFID sensors combine several measured parameters of impedance response with the multivariate analysis of these parameters. Thus, these individual sensors provide a unique capability of multiparameter sensing and rejection of environmental interferences. Sensitivity of developed RFID sensors provides detection of vapors at part-per-billion and part-per-million concentrations. Selectivity of developed RFID sensors facilitates selective quantitation of different individual vapors and their mixtures with a single sensor. Our passive RFID sensors were interrogated by the sensor reader at distances ranging from 0 to 33 cm and demonstrated their reliable operation even at the largest tested distance. In our sensing implementations, not the sensor but the sensor reader provides a 16-bit resolution and high signal-to-noise of the acquired signal. Rejection of interferences with a single sensor and the independence from costly proprietary RFID memory chips that have an analog input promise to impact numerous sensing applications.

RFID sensors as the common sensing platform for single-use biopharmaceutical manufacturing

The lack of reliable single-use sensors prevents the biopharmaceutical industry from fully embracing single-use biomanufacturing processes. Sensors based on the same detection platform for all critical parameters in single-use bioprocess components would be highly desirable to significantly simplify their installation, calibration and operation. We review here our approach for passive radio-frequency identification (RFID)-based sensing that does not rely on costly proprietary RFID memory chips with an analog input but rather implements ubiquitous passive 13.56 MHz RFID tags as inductively coupled sensors with at least 16 bit resolution provided by a sensor reader. The developed RFID sensors combine several measured parameters from the resonant sensor antenna with multivariate data analysis and deliver unique capability of multiparameter sensing and rejection of environmental interferences with a single sensor. This general sensing approach provides an elegant solution for both analytical measurement and identification and documentation of the measured location.

Theory and practice of ubiquitous quantitative chemical analysis using conventional computer optical disk drives.

We demonstrate a new attractive approach for ubiquitous quantitative chemical or biological sensing when analog signals are acquired from conventional optical disk drives, and these signals are used for quantitative detection of optical changes of sensing films deposited on conventional CD and DVD optical disks. Our developed analytical model of the operation of this Lab-on-DVD system describes the optical response of sensing films deposited onto the read surface of optical disks by taking into account the practical aspects of system performance that include possible reagent leaching effects, water sampling (delivering) efficiency, and possible changes of the film morphology after water removal. By applying a screen-printing process, we demonstrated a laboratory-scale automated production of sensing films with an average thickness of approximately 10 microm and a thickness relative standard deviation of <3% across multiple films. Finally, we developed a system for delivery of water-sample volumes to sensing films on the disk that utilized a multifunctional jewel case assembly.

Combinatorial screening of polymeric sensing materials using RFID sensors: combined effects of plasticizers and temperature.

Recently, we have developed battery-free, passive RFID chemical and biological sensors that are attractive in diverse applications where sensor performance is needed at a low cost and when battery-free operation is critical. In this study, we apply this attractive low-cost sensing platform for the combinatorial screening of formulated sensing materials. As a model system, a 6 x 8 array of polymer-coated RFID sensors was constructed to study the combined effects of polymeric plasticizers and annealing temperature. A solid polymer electrolyte Nafion was formulated with five different phthalate plasticizers: dimethyl phthalate, butyl benzyl phthalate, di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate, dicapryl phthalate, and diisotridecyl phthalate. These sensing film formulations and control sensing films without a phthalate plasticizer were deposited onto 9-mm diameter RFID sensors, exposed to eight temperatures ranging from 40 to 140 degrees C using a gradient temperature heater, and evaluated for their response stability and gas-selectivity response patterns. This study demonstrated that our RFID-based sensing approach permits rapid cost-effective combinatorial screening of dielectric properties of sensing materials.

Passive multivariable temperature and conductivity RFID sensors for single‐use biopharmaceutical manufacturing components

Single‐use biopharmaceutical manufacturing requires monitoring of critical manufacturing parameters. We have developed an approach for passive radio‐frequency identification (RFID)‐based sensing that converts ubiquitous passive 13.56 MHz RFID tags into inductively coupled sensors. We combine several measured parameters from the resonant sensor antenna with multivariate data analysis and deliver unique capability of multiparameter sensing and rejection of environmental interferences with a single sensor. We demonstrate here the integration of these RFID sensors into single‐use biopharmaceutical manufacturing components. We have tested these sensors for over 500 h for measurements of temperature and solution conductivity with the accuracy of 0.1°C (32–48°C range) and accuracy of 0.3–2.9 mS/cm (0.5–230 mS/cm range). We further demonstrate simultaneous temperature and conductivity measurements with an individual RFID sensor with the accuracy of 0.2°C (5–60°C range) and accuracy of 0.9 mS/cm (0.5–183 mS/cm range). Developed RFID sensors provide several important features previously unavailable from other single‐use sensing technologies such as the same sensor platform for measurements of physical, chemical, and biological parameters; multi‐parameter monitoring with individual sensors; and simultaneous digital identification.

Selective detection of chemical species in liquids and gases using radio-frequency identification (RFID) sensors

We demonstrate selective and sensitive chemical sensing based on battery-free passive radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors. Developed sensors are illustrated in sensing of ions and organic solvents in water and toxic vapors in air. These sensors are immune to variable ambient conditions, including air bubbles (in water sensing) and uncontrolled levels of relative humidity (in gas sensing).

Multisize CdSe Nanocrystal/Polymer Nanocomposites for Selective Vapor Detection Identified from High-Throughput Screening Experimentation

We have implemented high-throughput spectroscopic screening tools for the investigation of vapor-selectivity of CdSe semiconductor nanocrystals of different size (2.8- and 5.6-nm diameter) upon their incorporation in a library of rationally selected polymeric matrices. This library of resulting sensing materials was exposed to polar and nonpolar vapors in air. Each of the sensing materials demonstrated its own photoluminescence vapor-response patterns. Two criteria for the evaluation of vapor responses of the library of sensing materials included the diversity and the magnitude of sensing responses. We have found several polymer matrices that simultaneously meet these criteria. Our new sensing materials based on polymer-embedded semiconductor nanocrystal reagents of different size promise to overcome photobleaching and short shelf life limitations of traditional fluorescent organic reagent-based sensing materials.