New composite porphyrin-conductive polymer gas sensors for application in electronic noses

Abstract In this paper, a new composite sensor for e-nose application is described. A modification in the regular pair conductive polymer/Lewis acid dopant is proposed, replacing the acid by free-base or metallated porphyrins. Sensors doped with different porphyrin species, using the same conductive polymer, led to a huge variation in response to selected analytes. Two different arrays (doped with free-base and metallated porphyrins) using these sensors were able to identify four organic solvents, used as standard analytes: propanone, ethyl acetate, ethanol and toluene. Both of them could distinguish the tested vapours.