Smart Chemical Sensors: Concepts and Application

Abstract

This PhD thesis introduces basic concepts of smart chemical sensors design, which are afterwards applied to a particular application: the analysis of natural gas.

The thesis addresses thus two sets of objective, a first set of objectives related to the conceptual design of a smart chemical sensor using smart sensor standards:

- The design of an optimal smart chemical sensor architecture

- The novel combination in a working prototype of the highly complementary smart sensor standards IEEE-1451 and BS-7986

A second set of objectives is directly related to the selected application. Natural gas quality control. Natural gas is an energy source of major importance in the world energy supply, its quality control is increasingly important due to its origin-dependent properties and the progressive liberalization of the energy market. The objectives related to this application are:

- To solve the natural gas quality analysis problem by using a lower cost approach taking advantage of MEMS technology, smart sensor features, and embedded intelligent signal processing.

- To select suitable sensing technologies and associated signal processing.

An overall goal addressed by the PhD Thesis is in the end the reporting of a working smart sensor prototype implementing all the smart sensor features, MEMS based natural gas analysis and advanced signal processing as a demonstration of a novel low-cost and high speed natural gas analyzer.

The thesis covers this research along 7 chapters, introducing the concepts and application in chapters 1 and 2, the objectives in chapter 3, the simulation of a proposed MEMS sensor approach in chapter 4, the description of the advanced signal processing approach adopted in chapter 5, the description of the electronics and engineering of the smart natural gas analyzer prototype in chapter 6, and finally the conclusions of the work in chapter 7.

La tesis introduce conceptos básicos sobre el diseño de sensores químicos inteligentes, en particular presenta los estándares propuestos IEEE-1451 y BS-7986, y elabora una propuesta para el diseño óptimo de dichos sensores químicos inteligentes.

Se implementa la propuesta de diseño para una aplicación concreta, el análisis de gas natural. Además de la aplicación de los conceptos sobre sensores químicos inteligentes se pretende además diseñar un analizador compacto, rápido y de bajo coste, para ello se estudia el uso de un microsensor termoeéctrico como sensor principal del analizador. Una vez probada su viabilidad se implementan ambos conceptos (sensores inteligentes y microsensor termoeléctrico) en un prototipo funcional validado en laboratorio.

Como resultado se obtiene una propuesta para el diseño de sensores químicos inteligentes basada en estándares, y por otro lado se presenta un nuevo analizador de gas natural, más rápido y compacto que los existentes. Los resultados obtenidos originan diversas publicaciones en revistas así como dos patentes de método y sistema.