Final Activity Report Summary - BIOFET (Portable and disposable biosensor microarray based on FETs with a biofunctional gate to detect VOCs in breath)
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) gas sensitive films onto micromachined interdigitated gold electrodes are highly interesting devices. Scientifically speaking they allow to study the physicochemical properties of the considered gas sensitive materials and therefore obtain a more accurate and précis design of further devices, and technologically speaking these devices are easier, more reliable and cheaper to produce and implement than the capacitors so they are worthy to be studied because they are much more likely to be commercialised. Moreover CNTs based sensors show sensitivity to gases such as NO2 which is present in the breath of a person with diabetes -a disease that will affect more than 220 million people in the world by 2010- at room temperatures. For this reason the device can have a great commercial interest in the field of medicine and pharmacy.
CNTs have been tested and CNTs non-covalently wrapped with active polymers and Pt/Pd/CuPc-decorated have also been studied. A gas set-up designed to study gas sensors has been used for testing the devices. Cross sensitivity is an issue for CNTs sensors and the response of the CNTs sensors does depend on the gas environment to which the CNTs have previously been exposed. The sensors have been also exposed to a series of test gases including NO2, NH3, CO and H2 and exhibited ppm detection at room temperature. Increasing the temperature not only reduced the recovery time of the sensors, but also increased the sensitivity to some gases.
CNTs have been tested and CNTs non-covalently wrapped with active polymers and Pt/Pd/CuPc-decorated have also been studied. A gas set-up designed to study gas sensors has been used for testing the devices. Cross sensitivity is an issue for CNTs sensors and the response of the CNTs sensors does depend on the gas environment to which the CNTs have previously been exposed. The sensors have been also exposed to a series of test gases including NO2, NH3, CO and H2 and exhibited ppm detection at room temperature. Increasing the temperature not only reduced the recovery time of the sensors, but also increased the sensitivity to some gases.