One of the students in Notre Dame's Materials Science and Engineering PhD program will provide an update on their graduate research. Students in the program and students interested in learning more are welcome!

To RSVP, contact Heidi Deethardt for the meeting invitation. deethardt.1@nd.edu.

Presenter

Bingxin Yang, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Title: "Nanoengineered gas sensing materials for electronic nose (E-nose) application"

Abstract:

The electronic nose (E-nose) gas sensor array is composed of multiple gas sensors employed for analyte identification and quantification. Because of its real time monitoring, fast response/recovery time, high sensitivity, portability, and environmental friendliness, the E-nose has received considerable attention in applications such as evaluating greenhouse gas emission, agriculture, food quality, and early diagnosis of diseases from exhaled breath, such as lung cancer. Since the E-nose depends on individual gas sensors that rely highly on the properties of sensing materials, a library of nanoengineered sensing materials with improved gas sensing performance is introduced. Metal oxide semiconductors (MOS) have been widely studied and used for gas sensors due to their high sensitivity and acceptable selectivity. WO₃ and SnO₂ based nanofibers were synthesized via an electrospinning technique, followed by a post-treatment process with different variables, including controlled dimensions, grain size/crystallinity, dopant and its concentration, and various heterojunctions. Materials properties were characterized by XRD and UV-Vis spectroscopies, as well as SEM and TEM analysis. The effect of these variables on gas sensing performance was studied by screening the gas sensing performance when directed toward 12 different analytes and correlating with the materials' properties. The KNN model was trained by all the sensing data, which provided 98.125% accuracy to identify and quantify the 12 analytes.