c-MEMS based vapor preconcentrator/sensor for a micro gas chromatography

Abstract

Micro gas chromatography (?-GC) is the most promising technology suitable for quantitatively analyzing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) mixture. A ?-GC system is composed of three sub-components: a micro preconcentrator, a micro column, and a chemical sensor. The micro preconcentrator plays a key role in enhancing the chromatogram resolution by both concentrating the VOCs in the air and rapidly injecting them into the column by thermal desorption. Also, the high performance of a chemical sensor is essential in order to realize a micro analytical system. Here, we introduce a c-MEMS based nano-porous aligned material which can be used as the gas adsorbents for a preconcentrator as well as the sensing materials for a chemical sensor. The preliminary test results using our novel nano-porous adsorbents revealed presences of both the high preconcentration factor and the high sensitivity for chemical sensing. The validated performance of the c-MEMS based GC system promises the development of a high performance field deployable micro GC system in the near future.