Sensing materials play a key role in the successful implementation of chemical sensors, which can be applied for the automation of myriad industrial processes, as well as for everyday monitoring of such activities as public safety, engine performance, medical therapeutics, and many more. The world of sensing materials is very broad. Our main idea was to create really useful encyclopedia-handbook of chemical sensing materials. Therefore, in our edition, Chemical Sensors: Fundamentals of Sensing Materials, we have been trying to cover the widest set of materials aimed for those purposes and to estimate their real advantages and shortcomings.
Volume 1: General Approaches, should be considered as Introduction to Fundamentals of Sensing Materials. This book via brief description of constructions and principles of chemical sensors operation provides basic knowledge necessary for understanding specificity of chemical sensing. In spite of seeming extreme simplicity of chemical sensor operation and application, understanding the mechanisms involved in the process of chemical sensing is usually not so simple. Chemical sensing as a rule is multi-stage and multi-channel process, which requires multidisciplinary approach. Therefore, in present volume one can find a description of electronic, electrophysical, structural and chemical properties, as well as diffusions, adsorption/disorption and catalytic processes. Readers of present volume will find description of different technique such as various methods of films deposition, sol-gel technology, deposition from solutions, colloidal processing, peculiarities of polymers synthesis, techniques used for deposition of coating on fibers. This description, which is accompanied by detailed analysis of advantages and shortcomings of those methods, provides understanding necessary for substantiated selection of technologies for sensitive layer’s forming. Analysis of metal oxides modification methods discovers opportunities for control of sensing materials properties, and demonstrates that a choice of methods should be based on consideration of all possible consequences from used technical decision.
