Gas sensing technologies -- status, trends, perspectives and novel applications

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advancements in gas sensing technologies, focusing on transduction principles, nanostructured sensing materials, and signal processing, highlighting their applications in environmental, food, and medical diagnostics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of established and emerging gas sensing approaches, recent breakthroughs, challenges, and future perspectives in the field.

Findings

Advances in nanostructured sensing layers and materials.

Integration of artificial neural networks for signal processing.

Expansion of applications in environmental and health monitoring.

Abstract

The strong, continuous progresses in gas sensors and electronic noses resulted in improved performance and enabled an increasing range of applications with large impact on modern societies, such as environmental monitoring, food quality control and diagnostics by breath analysis. Here we review this field with special attention to established and emerging approaches as well as the most recent breakthroughs, challenges and perspectives. In particular, we focus on (1) the transduction principles employed in different architectures of gas sensors, analysing their advantages and limitations; (2) the sensing layers including recent trends toward nanostructured, low-dimensional and composite materials; (3) advances in signal processing methodologies, including the recent advent of artificial neural networks. Finally, we conclude with a summary on the latest achievements and trends in terms of applications.