Assessing the diagnostic information in the response patterns of a temperature-modulated tin oxide gas sensor

The transient response patterns of a tin oxide chemoresistive gas sensor, temperature-modulated by the application of staircase voltage waveforms to its microheater, to five different volatile organic compounds were compared with respect to their target gas discriminating features. These patterns were divided into a number of segments, each corresponding to a temperature transition at the surface of the tin oxide pallet. The effectiveness of the gas discriminating information content of each segment was quantitatively assessed utilizing Fisher's discriminant ratio calculations in a 3D feature space. It was established that the amount of the useful information in a response segment depended on the corresponding temperature transition; larger pallet temperature transitions rendered more diagnostic information. Similar assessments were carried out for the different combinations of these segments. The results facilitated, for the first time, a comparative analysis of the levels of the correlated (redundant) and uncorrelated information in the different response segments. It was shown that the response segments occurring at or near the nominal operating temperature of the sensor contained most of the effective information, while those at low temperatures contained mostly the redundant or indiscriminative information. The results help minimize the temperature modulation duration required for gas recognition.