Resolving Fast Gas Transients with Metal Oxide Sensors

Electronic olfaction can help detect and localize harmful gases and pollutants, but theturbulence of the natural environment presents a particular challenge: odor encounters are intermittent, andan effective electronic nose must therefore be able to resolve short odor pulses. The slow responses of thewidely used metal oxide (MOX) gas sensors complicate the task. Here, we combine high-resolution data acquisition with a processing method based on Kalman filtering and absolute-deadband sampling to extract fast onset events. We find that our system can resolve the onset time of odor encounters with enough precision for source direction estimation with a pair of MOX sensors in a stereo-osmic configuration.