GC-QEPAS: A Mems-Enabled Portable Trace Chemical Sensor for Safety & Security Applications

Abstract

This paper reports on a portable selective sensor for trace levels of hazardous vapors, which combines a twostage purge and trap vapor pre-concentration system, a MEMS gas-chromatographic (GC) separation column and a miniaturized quartz-enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy (QEPAS) detector. This is the first demonstration of a miniaturized QEPAS device used as spectroscopic detector downstream of a FAST-GC separation column, demonstrating two-dimensional selectivity and enabling real-world analyses in dirty environments with response time of a few minutes. Furthermore, the integrated sensing system was specifically designed to be rugged and suitable to be deployed on unmanned robotic ground vehicles.