Chemical sensing future trends

The potential of EPs for use in chemical sensors has to be viewed in the context of the existing and future trends in development of these devices. The entire field of chemical sensors is moving in the direction of miniaturization. Closely related to it is the trend to group individual microsensors into multichannel sensing probes. This is followed by the enhancement of the information acquisition process by modern statistical data evaluation techniques, i.e. chemometrics, neural nets, etc. 

In the latter context, a clear trend is to be seen towards chemical sensing with molecular materials in general This trend is similar in other potential fields of future applications of the same molecular materials as, for instance in molecular electronics or integrated optics It concerns the use of ultra-pure oligomers instead of polymers as starting materials and the growth of well-ordered monolayer or multilayer films with such molecular or supramolecular units... 

Modular components of future chemical sensor systems are introduced briefly Their development involves, in particular, new or fine-tuned (well-known) sensor-active materials and transducers A molecular understanding of the sensing mechanisms is shown to be a prerequisite for the development of a new generation of sensor systems with particular emphasis on their miniaturization and integration This understanding requires comparative microscopic, spectroscopic and sensor test studies on prototype materials to be performed, which requires to use experimental setups that combine the usual techniques of interface analysis with sensor preparation and sensor test chambers A few selected case studies on prototype materials are chosen to illustrate recent trends in the development of new materials and transducers for integrated chemical and biochemical sensor systems... 

In this chapter, the basis of techniques based on the measurement of electrical properties of electrode-solution, modified electrode-solution or solid-solution interfaces has been discussed. It has been demmistrated how they can be employed for characterisation of chemical systems and for analysis through selected examples. There has been an upward trend in the use of all the types of sensor and sensing techniques described, which can be expected to continue in the future. 

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