Development of a portable gas sensing platform with QCM sensors for volatiles of agro products

Abstract

An approach towards developing a portable electronic nose with quartz crystal microbalance sensor (QCM) is described in this paper. The developed portable system comprised of a QCM sensor chamber, electronic circuits for frequency oscillation, Arduino Due development board, a USB based 32-bit microcontroller system comprising of ARM-M3 SAM3X8E chip for data processing and data acquisition, followed by an SD card slot for data storage and a liquid crystal display (LCD) for display. The system can be operated with 5V using a commercial power bank. The real-time data can also be viewed as graphs on a PC or laptop using serial port communication. This paper demonstrates the instrument and working to detect different VOCs present in fruits and spices effectively using coated QCM sensors. The developed system can quickly determine different sensor parameters like sensitivity, selectivity, repeatability, and reusability. Therefore, the system can be a low-cost, robust, and user-friendly solution for aroma-based quality analysis in the agro-industry.