Development of acoustic devices functionalized with cobalt corroles or metalloporphyrines for the detection of carbon monoxide at low concentration

International audienceProgresses in synthetic chemistry methodologies has pushed to develop a large variety of artificial receptors of particular interest for chemical sensor applications. We investigate here the behavior of gas sensors based on surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices. The use of Love waves that are specially sensitive to surface perturbation enables to exploit the molecular recognition processes occurring in non conductive sensing layers of cobalt corroies [5,10,15-Tris(2,6-dichlorophenyl)corrolato]cobalt(III)] for CO detection. We have monitored phase variations of Love-wave-based delay lines under various operation conditions and studied the detection efficiency of a differential version of our sensors. A test bench also has especially been developed to allow for the regeneration of the sensor by freeing the CO trapping sites and therefore to provide an accurate control of the operation conditions. The detection threshold reached using the proposed SAW sensor is experimentally found below one ppm