Polymer coated sensor array based on quartz crystal microbalance for chemical agent analysis

Quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) gas sensors based on polymeric material were fabricated and their gas response characteristics were examined for four simulant gases of chemical agents, which were dimethyl methyl phosphonate (DMMP), N,N-dimethylacetamide (DMA), 1,5-dichloropentane (DCP) and dichloroethane (DCE). For the selection of appropriate coating materials, both principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster methods were applied to a data set collected from 15 QCM sensors for 12 analytes. Four appropriate coating materials were selected after optimizing the correlation between the 15 coating materials and the first four principal component (PC) factors. The four chosen polymers were used as sensitive component for a sensor array, and then PCA is adapted to classify four simulant gases. The results show that the QCM sensor array has high sensitivity and selectivity to four chemical agents.