Separating a gas Mixture into its Constituent Analytes Using FICA

Unlike the conventional "lock-and-key" sensor design in which one sensor is finely tuned to respond to one analyte, the sensor array approach employs multiple sensors in which one sensor responds to many analytes. Consequently, signal processing algorithms must be used to identify the analyte present from the array's response. The analyte identification process becomes significantly more complicated when a mixture of analytes is presented to the sensor array. We have designed a novel method, fingerprint-based ICA (FICA), to extract and identify individual analytes from a sensor array's response to a gas mixture of the analytes. Our results indicate FICA performs better with a simpler, faster classifier than conventional methods.