Publications Details
Chemically Selective Coated Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM) Array for Detection of Volatile Organic Chemicals
Liquid flow cells have been fabricated to prepare an array of QCMS operating simultaneously for detection and identification of VOCS in water. TWO signals, a tlequency response and a damping voltage response, were obtained per resonator. A blank QCM was used as a reference to account for changes in liquid density and viscosity. Nine different polymer coatings applied using a spin coat technique have been examined for VOC response under liquid flow conditions. A matrix of three classes of VOCS were examined for each coating with four chemicals in each class. The three classes of VOCS are polar, nonpolar and chlorinated. A pattern recognition technique, called visually empirical region of influence (VERI), was used to cluster the responses in n-dimensional space. Chemicals within a class varying by only one methyl group (e.g., toluene and xylene) are easily discriminated using only two different coatings with three different QCM responses. All chemicak were easily separated and detected with a total of 5 films and 6 responses with >99% accuracy.