A Diagnostic Case Study for Manufacturing Gas-Phase Chemical Sensors

In this work, we describe the design, manufacturing development and refinement of a chemical detection platform designed to identify specific odorants in the natural gas industry. As the demand for reliable and sensitive volatile organic compound (VOC) detection systems grows, our project aimed to construct multiple prototypes to enhance detection capabilities and provide portable detection platforms. Throughout the development process across nominally identical and duplicate instruments, various failure modes were encountered, which provided insight into the design and manufacturing challenges present when designing such platforms. We conducted a post-hoc root cause analysis for each failure mode, leading to a series of design modifications and solutions. This paper details these design and manufacturing challenges, the analytical methods used to diagnose and address them, and the resulting improvements in system performance. In the end, a debugging flow chart is presented to aid future researchers in solving possible issues that could be encountered. Our findings show the complexities of bespoke chemical sensor design for unique applications and highlight the critical importance of iterative testing and problem-solving in the development of industrial detection technologies. Achieving consistency across devices is essential for optimizing device-to-device efficiency. The work presented is the first step towards ensuring uniform performance across a production run of chemically sensitive devices. In the future a universal device calibration model will be implemented, eliminating the need to collect data from each individual device.