An Adaptive Electronic Interface for Gas Sensors

This thesis focuses on the development of an adaptive electronic interface for gas sensors that are used in the NC State electronic nose. We present an adaptive electronic interface that allows for the accurate mapping of the sensor's voltage output to sensor resistance profiles. The adaptive interface uses a linearized Wheatstone bridge in a constant current configuration. The balancing of the bridge and the adjustment of the subsequent gain stage is performed using programmable variable resistors. The programmable resistors are controlled by a LabVIEW ® program. The same control program also determines and records all the resistor values in the interface circuit. The resistance of each sensor is accurately computed by LabVIEW ® using the interface-circuit resistor values and the voltage output of the circuit. Compensating for sensor drift can be done in LabVIEW® by adjusting the programmable resistor values so that a zero-voltage output is produced during the reference cycle. By doing this zero adjustment between each " sniff " of an odorant, the baseline drift can be minimized. A single channel of the adaptive electronic interface has been designed and tested. The interface can be calibrated so that it is 99% accurate when performing sensor resistance measurements. A new conducting polymer sensor chamber has also been designed and tested. The new radial flow sensor chamber minimizes the dead volume in the chamber and also delivers the odorant to each sensor at the same time. Two operating modes were compared: continuous-flow and sniff-and-hold. Both modes gave good classification performance while testing four different coffee samples. Experimental testing indicates that sensor response is highly correlated with the sample flow rate. Future work to more fully characterize this correlation is recommended. Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my three-month old son Evan Winfield Cavanaugh. I learned from his birth how insignificant everything else really is. Now that I am finished, I can dedicate more of my time to him. iii Biography CURTIS CAVANAUGH was born in West Palm Beach, FL. After graduation from Southwide Academy in 1989, he entered military service in the United States Marine Corps. During his military service he worked as an electronics technician at the Marine Corps Logistics Base, Albany, GA and at Camp Lejeune, NC. Upon completion of military service, he worked for several years as an electronics technician at Electrical South Limited Partnership in Greensboro, NC while taking college courses at the