Abstract:
Low cost sensor technologies are key enablers of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Physical sensors for motion, temperature, pressure, light and sound are already broadly deployed. However, chemical sensors are much less ubiquitous, especially for mobile and consumer applications. The reason is that the technical challenge of detecting specific molecules traditionally requires technologies that don’t scale well such as optical and electrochemical sensors. We present a new approach to a chemical sensor on a chip based on a recently discovered novel class of porous materials called Metal-organic Frameworks (MOFs). These molecular “tinker toys” can be tuned to capture specific molecules of commercial interest such as methane for leak detection and carbon dioxide for indoor air quality. Our sensor is comprised of a MOF-coated quartz timing crystal that we use as a mass transducer. The result is a scalable chemical sensor with >10x improvement in cost, size, and power consumption compared to existing technologies.