Detection of air pollutants is of great importance for evaluating indoor air quality in industrial and commercial buildings, schools, hospitals, and private homes. The EPA estimates that poor indoor air quality is responsible for over 125 million lost school days and over 10 million lost work days each year and affects 33 to 50% of U.S. commercial buildings. Current approaches to air quality monitoring have multiple drawbacks. Nanostructured materials, with their small grain size, large number of grain boundaries and high specific area, present new opportunities for the development of sensors for air quality control with significantly improved properties. The proposed effort aims to develop a compact, robust, real-time monitoring system for indoor air quality, based on an array of nanostructured sensors. The array will be micromachined from self-organized nanoporous material, which will host sensitive elements with nanoengineered morphology and chemical composition, tailored to the application requirements and enabling advanced performance. During Phase I generic sensor array prototypes will be developed and their performance merit for detecting of volatile organic compounds and formaldehyde will be demonstrated. Phase Il will further develop and scale-up the technology, produce sensor arrays for specific applications, and begin commercialization.
Proposed technology has a significant commercial potential due to a critical demand for low-cost, real-time detectors for indoor air quality assessment. Proposed sensor array, if realized, would quickly find widespread acceptance in health care facilities, chemical, automotive, and building materials industries, schools, private homes, etc.
