Resolving fast gas transients with Metal-Oxide sensors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel data processing approach combining high-resolution acquisition, Kalman filtering, and deadband sampling to enable Metal-Oxide sensors to detect and localize rapid gas transients in turbulent environments.

Contribution

It presents a new method that significantly improves the temporal resolution of MOX sensors, allowing them to resolve fast odor pulses and estimate odor direction.

Findings

System can resolve precise odor onset times

Enables stereo-based odor direction estimation

Improves detection of short gas transients

Abstract

Electronic olfaction can help detect and localise harmful gases and pollutants, but the turbulence of natural environment presents a particular challenge: odor encounters are intermittent, and an effective electronic nose must therefore be able to resolve short odor pulses. The slow responses of the widely-used Metal-Oxide (MOX) gas sensors complicate the task. Here we combine high-resolution data acquisition with a processing method based on Kalman filtering and absolute-deadband sampling to extract fast transients. We find that our system can resolve the precise time of odor onset events, allowing direction estimation with a pair of MOX sensors in stereo-osmic configuration.