Miniaturized VOC Detectors for Monitoring Indoor Air Quality

With the increased use of chemicals for laundry and cleaning, artificial adhesives, paints, and space heaters indoors, the concentration of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) increases, thus threatening human health. It is known that VOCs are the possible causes of atopic disease and asthma. Some of the VOC species such as formaldehyde and benzene are carcinogenic. The first step to avoid damage from VOCs is to determine their concentration in air. In typical approaches to detect VOCs, an adsorbent to capture the gas molecules of the VOCs is placed in the area of interest and taken to a laboratory, and subsequently, the VOCs are thermally desorbed and directed to large-sized detectors; the entire process is time-consuming and costly. With the increased public awareness of the hazards of VOCs, research on the cost-effective detection of VOCs using small personal devices has become more active. In this chapter, fundamental technologies to detect VOCs are introduced, and current research works are discussed on low-cost sensing of VOCs using miniaturized devices to evaluate indoor air quality.