Wireless Decontamination Gas Monitor

Seacoast Science proposes to fabricate a detector that will monitor the presence and concentration of two chemicals commonly used for building decontamination. Ultimately this program will yield a small, rugged, lightweight, low-power system designed for continuous unattended operation or handhel battery operation. In unattended mode, the proposed detector will monitor chemical concentration and transmit levels and a detector location identificaton code wirelessly back to a central control unit. When used in handheld mode, the system will display chemical concentrations on a LCD display. The system includes a chemical sensor array optimized for detecton of two decontamination chemicals, chlorine dioxide and hydrogen peroxide, a gas sampling system, a radio for wireless communication and a small, rugged lightweight, and low-power source. Our MEMS chemicapacitor technology utilizes an array of surface micromachined capacitors, coated with chemoselective polymer coatings optimized for thee volatile decontamination chemicals. Inexpensive producton cost, robustness ad low power consumption, will result in a compelling detector system able to operate during the early phases of decontamination process when chemical concentration is high and late in the process to determine if the building can be safely reoccupied. In Phase I, we will develop chemoselective coatings on our existing MEMS capacitor sensors and test these sensors by exposing them to chlorine dioxide and hydrogen peroxide. We will evaluate these sensors by exposing them to the decontamination chemicals at appropriate concentrations under a range of environmental conditions. A breadboard detector system that demonstrates the detection of both chemicals will be built and tested near the end of Phase I. The data will then be evaluated to determine coating needs and processing requirements. We will use this information in Phase 2 to fine-tune our coatings, and to ultimately produce 4 prototype units. These prototyypes will be lightweithg, protable, and able to detect both decontamination gases and determine their concentrations. The development work on the MEMS-based sensors proposed here for emission gas detection has very broad relevance to a number of commercial applications. These sensors are ideal for monitoring a variety of chemical and physical targets in a distributed network where a premium is placed on early detection. The low cost, low power consumption and small size of this technology is expected to enable penetraton of market spaces previously inaccessible to existing commercial sensor systmes.