Online sampling conditioning for portable breath analyzers

AMLENDU PRABHAKAR; RODRIGO A. IGLESIAS; LIHUA ZANG; FRANCIS TSOW; ERICA FORZANI; NONGJIAN TAO

AMER CHEMICAL SOC

Lugar: Washington; Año: 2012 vol. 84 p. 7172 - 7172

arious innovative chemical sensors have been developed in recent years to sense dangerous substances in air and trace biomarkers in breath. However, in order to solve real world problems, the sensors must be equipped with efficient sample conditioning that can, e.g., control the humidity, which is discussed much less in the literature. To meet the demand, a miniaturized mouthpiece was developed for personal breath analyzers. A key function of the mouthpiece is to condition the humidity in real breath samples without changing the analyte concentrations and introducing substantial backpressure, which is achieved with optimized packing of desiccant particles. Numerical simulations were carried out to determine the performance of the mouthpiece in terms of various controllable parameters, such as the size, density, and geometry of the packing. Mouthpieces with different configurations were built and tested, and the experimental data validated the simulation &#