WIRELESS ORGANIC CHEMICAL SENSOR (15P07HNWLBauh)

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

For this research project highly sensitive Single wall carbon nano-tubules (SWNTs)are deposited by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) techniques on the surface of novel contour-mode AlN piezoelectric MEMS/NEMS resonators to form batteryless acoustic sensor wireless platforms for the detection of different gas species. A circuit will detect a particular species by finding differences between the resonant frequencies of micro/nanoresonators loaded with carbon nanotubes and decorated with inkjet deposited ss-DNA sequences. A high degree of specificity will result from the sequence dependent adhesion between the volatile organic molecules and the resonators. After a few seconds, the organic molecules will detach from the DNA enabling built-in reset as the environment changes. The RF interface electronics will periodically report these changes to an external interrogator. The resonant aluminum nitride (AlN) contour-mode sensor platform functionalized by combinations of single stranded DNA on single wall carbon nanotubes that is proposed here will permit several orders of magnitude enhancement of state-of-the-art sensor performance. Specifically, the new platform will make possible: (i) 10x reduction in the false alarm rate, (ii) 1,000x improvement in sensitivity (from part per billion to part per trillion thanks to extremely small resonant mass and high frequency of operation), (iii) 1,000x reduction in size for 100 analytes detection in a small volume, (iv) 200x power savings, (v) faster response time (< 5 seconds thanks to self-refreshing sensor), (vi) dramatically reduced fabrication costs (thanks to batch production), (vii) remote operations (resonator as RFID tag) and (viii) almost zero operating expenses (thanks to the disposable nature of the sensor).