Analysis of deleterious chemical substances in end-user products (complex environments containing several diverse components) is of great interest in food, biomedical, and chemical industries in terms of quality control and public health. The most common analytical methods to discriminate chemicals in these complex environments are bulky and expensive spectroscopic techniques. Consequently, portable sensors with good sensitivity, selectivity and low cost are highly demanded for in-situ analysis of chemicals in complex environments.In this work, we report a portable optoelectronic nose concept using hollow core photonic band gap (PBG) infrared transmitting fiber arrays, a simple blackbody light source and a Mid-IR detector. In this compact design, analytes are detected through their specific infrared absorptions in microfluidic channels of the fibers, which have distinct infrared transmission bands in middle-infrared region. The variable array design and the optofluidic approach allows sensitive detection of chemicals in less than a second with excellent selectivity. Here, we demonstrated that the optoelectronic nose can discriminate very similar chemicals (ethanol and methanol) in humid and chemically complex beer and fruit juice backgrounds. The discrimination of these two resembling alcohols from each other is particularly important to detect falsified alcoholic beverages, in which toxic methanol is used instead of ethanol. The optoelectronic nose classified methanol adulterated beverages and authentic ones correctly for several repeated measurements.We shall emphasize that, besides the detection of counterfeit alcoholic beverages, the flexibility in the optoelectronic nose design and its simple and cost effective production makes this novel concept a promising contender as a portable analytical instrument, which could be employed in many aspects of our everyday lives.

Smelling in chemically complex environments: A compact optoelectronic nose for methanol adulterated beverages

246th National Meeting (2013)

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