Portable optical air sensor
Open-knowledge reference entry
Optical air sensors center around the detection of some form of light created by a chemical process, in order to identify or measure amounts of individual molecules. Portable sensors are specifically sensors that are easy to transport and use in the field.
Sol-gel
One of the primary methods of optical air sensing involves taking a sol-gel, which is made by taking a sol, a liquid with stable colloidal particles, and mixing it with a gel, which is a three dimensional continuous network encompassing a liquid. The sol-gel is then exposed to a certain indicator which becomes part of the sol-gel. Typically the production of a sol-gel follows a hydrolysis and then condensation pathway.
Hydrolysis involves adding a hydrogen atom onto the gel. Condensation is a method involving bonding two different gel molecules together to create a sol-gel as a whole. This method consists of dissolving some solid into a solvent and then maintaining a basic pH as the mixture is refluxed to condense and produce a gel.
One example of the sol-gel method in use today is the feeling of air acidity. The sol-gel is made with an organic dye, (2-[4-(dimethylamino)- phenylazo]benzoic acid).
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This entry incorporates text from “Portable optical air sensor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.