Markets, chemical sensors

We estimate that there are i proximately 100 companies, worldwide, actively marketing chemical sensors or biosensors or technology [3]. Commercial and academic laboratories actively working in chemical sensors or biosensors number many more than this and at least 500 laboratories or more are actively working in the area. The reasons for this activity have been illustrated throughout this text chemical sensors and biosensors represent a new, improved, and often unique approach to real time measurements applicable to nearly every industry and market segment. 

Environics produces chemical sensors, detectors, and detection systems for protection of people, the environment, and for space research. Their sales network covers more than thirty countries all over the world. Currently, in the United States, they are marketing the ChemPro 100 for both military and civil defense, as well as other chemical detection gear. 

Numerous investigations of the market of chemical and biological sensors, especially in USA, were published recently. In-Star/MDR (http //www.instat.com) reported an annual growth rate of 11.5% for the market of biological and chemical sensors from... 

Chemical sensor market can be considered as a part of a wider market of artificial sensing. The BBC Research (http //www.bccresearch.com) forecasts an annual growth rate 4.6% for commercial and medical sensing applications between 2007 and 2012 in a global market overview. 

Freedonia Group Research. 2005. Chemical sensors to 2009 demand and sales forecasts, market share, market size, market leaders, study 2005. December, available at http // www.freedoniagroup.com/Chemical-Sensors.html (accessed October 11, 2007). 

The last chapter in this text deals with sensor commercialization and markets. Chemical and biosensors are following a commercialization pathway similar to other detection and measurement devices such as analytical chemistry instrumentation in the 1950s and 1960s, and immunoassay in the 1970s and 1980s. Common to these products, sensors will achieve a critical mass which will push them into large-scale commercialization by the first part of the 21st century. 

This definition also clarifies what is not a chemical sensor or biosensor for purposes of market projections and commercialization. Passive assays such as, for example, colorimetric chemical reactions, immunoassays, and nucleic acid probes are not sensors. While such assays do result in a quantifiable entity (such as color production, fluorescence, etc), the assay itself does not provide the means to quantify the response. Rather, a separate quantification system is required. 

Table 23.1 lists a number of companies actively developing and/or marketing chemical or biosensors. Applications for these sensors are diverse, from medical applications to environmental monitoring and food quality determinations. This diversity illustrates the generic nature common to most chemical and biosensors. Once the basic transduction and electronic components of the sensor have been developed and manufactured, the application of the sensor to measurements for a wide range of analytes is only limited by the specificity and selectivity of its active chemicaWjiological surface. Thus while the initial development of chemical and biosensors requires high-risk investment, successful development of the basic sensor can result in a family of products applicable over broad markets. 

Chemical sensor and biosensor commercialization must also pass a difficult set of criteria and questions at every point of development. These questions are aimed at measuring current and future technical and market performance for the sensor and include the following. 

Market and business issues have also slowed chemical sensor and biosensor commercialization. As often occurs with technologies encompassing many disciplines, problems with patents and proprietary technology protection have appeared. For example, one common transducer used for both chemical sensors and biosensors is the integrated electrode capacitor (see chapter 8 for a description of this transducer). Although the design for this transducer has been in the public domain for over 25 years, chemical modification of the surface characteristics of the electrodes can lead to a new patent position. This then leads to complex claims and counterclaims about the use of the basic transducer technology. 

The basic characteristics of chemical sensors and biosensors—including high specificity and sensitivity, portability, real time output, cost effectiveness, and user friendliness—make them applicable to virtually every major product market. The immediate market targets for these sensors are in medical diagnostics, detection and alarm systems, environmental monitoring, and food processing. Future markets include application of chemical sensors and... 

In assessing and predicting markets for chemical sensors and biosensors, the definition cited above for chemical sensors and biosensors requires additional refinement since a functional (technological) definition does not adequately address specific applications and markets. 

Current and projected markets for chemical sensors are shown in table 23.8. The biomedical market consists primarily of chemical sensors for blood gases and electrolytes. This area is growing as portable, real time systems such as the i-STAT clinical analyzer are increasingly used at point of care and remote testing locations. The demand for faster, more reliable, and cheaper detectors for environmental and workplace monitoring for toxic gases and volatile organics... 

Table 23.8 Current and projected world markets for chemical sensors... 

Chapters 15-26 deal with speciHc applications of chemical and biochemical sensors in selected typical application fields. In many of these fields, analytical chemistry has been and still continues to be the most important approach for problem solving. As a result, the current market for sensors is orders of magnitudes lower than the market for high-cost instrumentation in analytical chemistry. 

As a result of such temporal instability, in spite of the wide range of chemical sensor prototypes based on polymer films, very few have found their way onto the market. Though they may have excellent analytical qualities, the devices are often unsuitable for industrial fabrication, either because of low technological effectiveness of the fabrication process or insufficient reliability and stability. This means that to utilize the advautages of some polymers, such as a rare combination of electrical, electrochemical, and physical properties, it is necessary to increase their processability as well as their temporal, environmental, and thermal stability (Kumar and Sharma 1998). 

A number of chemical sensors have been put recently on the market which prove to be efficient for determination of chemical warfare agents and their decomposition products with high selectivity in air. There are interesting research works on biosensors for determining chemical and biological weapons on the basis of biological receptors (proteins, antibodies, enzymes, etc. (Table 13))... 

A complete system providing both a sensor and an actuator would be ideal in the field of process control, but because of a lack of truly reliable chemical sensors on the market the concept has not been widely implemented. One exception relates to the analytical method of coulometry, a technique that offers great potential for delivering chemical compounds to a controlled reaction. Especially attractive in this context is the method of constant- current coulometry, which can be carried out with an end-point sensor and a coulomet-ric actuator for maintaining a generator current until the end-point has been reached. In this case both of the required devices can be miniaturized and constructed with the same technology. 

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