Publications Details
Optimizing Chemical Sensor Array Sizes
Optimal selection of array sensors for a chemical sensing application is a nontrivial task. It is commonly believed that "more is better" when choosing the number of sensors required to achieve good chemical selectivity. However, cost and system complexity issues point towards the choice of small arrays. A quantitative array optimization is carried out to explore the selectivity of arrays of partially-selective chemical sensors as a function of array size. It is shown that modest numbers (dozens) of target analytes are completely distinguished with a range of arrays sizes. However, the array selectivity and the robustness against sensor sensitivity variability are significantly degraded if the array size is increased above a certain number of sensors, so that relatively small arrays provide the best performance. The results also suggest that data analyses for very large arrays of partially-selective sensors will be optimized by separately anal yzing small sensor subsets.