GasSensEne: Early detection of ultra-low concentrations of GASes in complex healthcare and air quality environments through a gas SENSor enhanced by graphENE

Gas array sensors enhanced by graphene, such as those produced by Altered Carbon (AC), offer an increased level of stability, detection specificity and sensitivity, portability and cost-effectiveness in the non-invasive detection of Nitrogen Oxides (NOx), which are biomarkers for various diseases and two of the main culprits behind ground-level ozone. Specifically, sensing hydrocarbons can detect different health conditions - e.g. acetone indicates diabetes, mercaptans indicate liver disease; dimethylamine and trimethylamine indicate kidney failure, and the lack of isoprene indicates lung cancer. Nitrogen Oxides, such as Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) is released into the atmosphere as a pollutant when fuels are burned in petrol and diesel engines, resulting in airway inflammation when inhaled for a prolonged period, asthma prevalence and incidence, cancer incidence, adverse birth outcomes and mortality (WHO, 2013). A NO2 sensor has applications in environmental pollution monitoring and healthcare. However, a major problem still faced by the producers of graphene-based gas array sensors is the ability to develop analytical instruments with high sensitivity, selectivity and low detection limit during gas detection analysis.

The GasSensEne (Early detection of ultra-low concentrations of GASes in complex healthcare and air quality environments through a gas SENSor enhanced by graphENE) project is a continuation of an A4I round 3 mini projects run between January and March 2019. The project will see both partners - Altered Carbon and National Physical Laboratory (NPL) - jointly continue working on industrial research to further enhance the setup for testing AC's sensors' ability to detect NOx gases to confirm generalisability of findings during the verification and validation testing pre-market launch. Solving this problem will dramatically increase the productivity during AC's sensor manufacturing and testing by an estimated 20% in the first year of full-system implementation and is estimated to improve AC's profits by approximately £625,000 within the first year (and £1,250,000 within 2-3 years). Additionally, a testing instrument able of accommodating more sensors during each test (8 devices currently but endeavouring to increase this number) will increase productivity both at AC by higher manufacturing capacity and decreased number of recalls, and at NPL and its future collaborators interested in using this new testing system. Furthermore, the goal of this testing setup is to also test for other gases, including Hydrogen Sulfide, Sulfur Dioxide, Carbon Monoxide, Carbon Dioxide, Hydrogen and Flammable Hydrocarbons, that AC aims to produce the sensors in the near future.