Joule Heating-Driven Modulation of Analyte Partitioning in Chemically Diverse, Conducting Composite Sensor Arrays: A New Approach for Active Sensing in Machine Olfaction

Animals adapt to dynamic olfactory environments through active sensing behaviors like sniffing, which create a dynamic baseline to detect new odors. In this work, we explore the use of Joule heating of individual sensors as an efficient thermal modulation method for machine olfaction, where response patterns are based on the temperature-dependent partitioning of odorants. The dynamic signals capture both odorant identity and concentration information with a relatively low power consumption. This approach is demonstrated with a chemically diverse carbon black-polymer composite array modulated with ∼50 mW square wave Joule heating to successfully discriminate multiple analytes across a range of concentrations.