The present invention relates to chemical sensors and, in particular, to a mixed-potential electrochemical sensor that can be used to measure emissions, such as NOx, CO, NH3, and hydrocarbons.
Lean burn gasoline and diesel engines use a high air-to-fuel ratio to ensure high fuel combustion efficiency and to lower CO and hydrocarbon (HC) emissions, but the excess oxygen partially reacts with nitrogen to create nitric oxides. Lean burn diesel engines therefore require a two-stage catalytic system to eliminate pollutants: an initial diesel oxidation catalyst is used to decompose CO and HCs and a urea-SCR system is used to reduce NOx to N2 via an NH3 mediated reaction. See M. V. Twigg, Appl. Catal. B Environ. 70, 2 (2007); J. Kašpar et al., Catal. Today 77, 419 (2003); and M. Koebel et al., Catal. Today 59, 335 (2000). Currently there are no sensors installed in automobiles that can quantitatively monitor the concentration of pollutants in the exhaust gas stream. Such sensors need to be robust in the atmosphere of exhaust gas, have low cost, and be able to distinguish between the different pollutant gases which may be present.
Mixed-potential electrochemical sensors are a promising technology for on board emissions monitoring in automobiles which meets these requirements. Mixed-potential electrochemical sensors comprise multiple dissimilar electrodes exposed to an analyte gas, typically a mixture containing oxygen and an oxidizable or reducible gas. Mixed potentials of different voltages develop on each electrode due to differences in electrokinetic redox rates of the dissimilar electrodes. The sensor response voltage is the difference in mixed potential attained by each electrode. For example, mixed potential sensors can take advantage of the difference in electrochemical kinetics of oxidation and reduction of a target pollutant gas and O2 of two dissimilar electrodes embedded in a solid electrolyte. See J. W. Fergus, J. Solid State Electrochem. 15, 971 (2011); and F. H. Garzon et al., Solid State Ionics 136-137, 633 (2000). Sensors pairing Pt and La0.8Sr0.2CrO3 (LSCO) have previously demonstrated high sensitivity to HCs at open circuit and NO under bias. See P. K. Sekhar et al., Sensors Actuators, B Chem. 144, 112 (2010); and P. K. Sekhar et al., Sensors Actuators B Chem. 183, 20 (2013). Pt and Au or Au alloys, such as Au/Pd, have proven to be sensitive electrode pairs for detection of both CO and NH3. See P. K. Sekhar et al., Sensors Actuators, B Chem. 144, 112 (2010); C. R. Kreller et al., ECS Trans. 64, 105 (2014); and J. W. Fergus, Sensors Actuators, B Chem. 122, 683 (2007). The integration of these two types of sensing electrode pairs onto one device in principle would enable the detection of all species of interest to automotive emissions.
The present invention is directed to a mixed-potential electrochemical gas sensing device. The robust sensor platform can measure EPA regulated emissions, such as NOx, CO, NH3, and hydrocarbons, with high accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Data processing with Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) provides >95% peak accuracy at discriminating individual components at the 50-250 PPM levels. The sensor enables real-time diagnostics, with response times less than 1/100 sec., and can operate in hostile high temperature combustion environments without the need for cooling or filtration. Therefore, the sensor can provide exhaust chemistry feedback information that can be used to improve combustion efficiency for diesel and gasoline engines, turbines, steam power plants, and other combustion applications. The sensor also enables the detection of explosive compounds with small handheld devices by providing a molecular fingerprint of the explosive compounds.
An exemplary device comprises Pt, La0.8Sr0.2CrO3 (LSCO), and Au/Pd alloy electrodes and a porous yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) electrolyte. The three-electrode design takes advantage of the preferential selectivity of the Pt+Au/Pd and Pt+LSCO pairs towards different species of gases and has additional tunable selectivity achieved by applying a current bias to the latter pair. As an example of the invention, voltages were recorded in single and binary gas streams of NO, NO2, C3H8, and CO. ANNs were trained to examine the voltage output from sensors in biased and unbiased modes to both identify which single test gas or binary mixtures of two test gases were present in a gas stream as well as extract concentration values. With this technique, binary and single gas mixtures of NO, NO2, CO, and C3H8 can be identified with >98% accuracy. The ANNs can also recover concentration values from voltages with peak error of 5%. Concentration values with peak error of 10% can be extracted from a ternary mixture of NO2, CO, and C3H8.
The detailed description will refer to the following drawings, wherein like elements are referred to by like numbers.
The present invention is directed to a mixed-potential electrochemical gas sensor. In
For ease of collecting training data for biased and unbiased mode simultaneously, two three-electrode sensors were placed in 1″ glass tubes through which test gas was flown. The temperature of the sensors was set at 480° C. for NOx, C3H8, and CO detection by a Custom Sensors Solutions Rev H-0 board which adjusts the applied voltage with a feedback look to maintain a fixed resistance on the heater leads. A higher temperature of 530° C. is needed for NH3 detection because the signal saturates. Gas mixing was controlled by an Environics 2000 gas mixer. Each sensor was exposed to a base gas of 10% O2, 2.5% CO2, and balance N2 to simulate a dilute exhaust gas stream. NO2, NO, C3H8, and CO were then injected at concentration levels of 75-250 ppm for C3H8 and 50-225 ppm for the others. For each pairwise combination of gases, data was collected at 25 ppm intervals, and an additional 30 randomly generated data points were obtained within each window. For ternary mixtures, data was collected between 50-150 ppm for CO and NO2 and 75-175 ppm for C3H8 at 25 ppm intervals and 90 randomly generated data points were collected in this window. The total flow rate out of the gas mixer was 180 SCCM, nominally split across each sensor at 90 SCCM. Data was collected using two Keithley 2400 Sourcemeters, a Fluke 8842A digital multimeter, and three HP 34401A digital multimeters connected to each pair of electrodes in the polarity convention as follows: Au/Pd (+) and Pt(−), LSCO (+) and Pt (−), Au/Pd (+) and LSCO (−). One sensor was left at open circuit while the other sensor had a negative bias of −0.2 μA (−0.6 μA for ammonia) applied to the LSCO and Pt pairs by one of the Keithley 2400 Sourcemeters. For each data point, base gas was flowed for 10 minutes, the test gas was added for 10 minutes, and then the sensor was purged with base gas for 10 minutes.
The two unsolved challenges which remain after a dataset of voltage-concentration values have been collected are: identification of which pollutant gas species are present in a stream and what are their concentrations. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) can be used which are capable of learning relationships between voltage inputs and concentration or gas identity outputs without the need to specify their functional form ahead of time and which can be flexibly applied to both regression and classification tasks. See M. Kubat, An Introduction to Machine Learning, Springer, New York, N.Y. (2015). ANNs have already shown success in the sensor field, having been applied to chemical detection and monitoring of food quality. See K. J. Albert et al., Chem. Rev. 100, 2595 (2000); J. White et al., Anal. Chem. 68, 2191 (1996); A. Galdikas et al., Sensors Actuators, B Chem. 69, 258 (2000); and X. L. Wang et al., Proc. 2012 2nd Int. Conf. Instrum. Meas. Comput. Commun. Control. IMCCC 2012, 702 (2012).
The ANNs used for data analysis with the present invention were structured in a way that can use data from the unbiased sensor, the biased sensor, or both, as shown in
The error function to be minimized is the average reduced squared error for m training data points (Equation 6) where for each data point, CANN is the result from the ANN and Csensor is the result from the experimental data. The ANN was implemented using the PyBrain (version 0.3.3) and NumPy (version 1.10.1) packages for the Python programming language (Python 2.7). See T. Schaul et al., J. Mach. Learn. Res. 11, 743 (2010). Other commercial neural network/machine learning toolkits can also be used. The data points were normalized to 250 ppm for the concentration values and 100 mV for the voltage values prior to input into the neural network. Each single gas or binary mixture was identified for classification tasks as a vector of 10 elements as seen in the output layer of the classification ANN in
Since it is impossible to draw 6-dimensional data and difficult to represent 3-dimensional data on a 2D graphic, principle component analysis (PCA) was used to compress the higher dimensional data down to 2D. PCA calculates the 2D plane in the higher dimensional space which minimizes the projection distance between data points and the plane. See E. Alpaydin, Introduction to Machine Learning, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., (2004). With m data points and n voltage measurements per data point, the m×n matrix X is constructed:
Let the covariance matrix
where XT represents the matrix transpose operation of a matrix X and * represents matrix multiplication. The singular value decomposition (SVD) of C produces three matrices in Equation 8.
U,S,V=SVD(C) [8]
To reduce the dimensionality down from higher dimension n to 2 dimensions, the first 2 columns of the matrix U are computed from SVD, defined as U2 and multiply it by Xn. Here, U2 is an n by 2 matrix, Xn is an m by n matrix, and X2 is an m by 2 matrix (Equation 9). The diagonal entries of the S matrix, the singular values, can be used to determine how many linearly independent parameters are present. In this case, since the Au/Pd+LSCO electrode pair measures the difference between the Au/Pd+Pt and LSCO+Pt electrodes, 4 non-zero singular values were found and 4 linearly independent measurements per data point were collected.
X
2
=X
n
*U
2 [9]
See M. T. Heath, Scientific Computing, McGraw-Hill, New York, N.Y., 2002. It is also possible to approximate n-dimensional data from a k-dimensional value. From a vector zk of dimension k, the approximation of the vector in n-dimensions zn is given by:
z
n
=U
k
*z
k [10]
This can be used to visualize decision boundaries for classification where the dataset from either the 3-dimensional voltage space of a single sensor or 6-dimensional voltage space of both unbiased and biased sensors is projected into 2D PCA space. Then, data points can be sampled within the window of 2D PCA space and projected back up into 3- or 6-dimensional voltage space using Equation 10. A contour plot of the confidence of the network is generated at the sampled position in 2D PCA space, defined as the ratio of the output node of a gas mixture label with the highest value to the sum of the output nodes in the classification ANN at the sampled positions.
Prior to analyzing binary gas responses, the response of the three-electrode sensor in biased and unbiased mode was tested against varying concentrations of single test gases, as shown in
While a linear fit is suitable for single gas mixtures, the voltage response when binary and ternary mixtures are present is more complex due to the interactions among the different gases. Examining the voltage response on the Au/Pd+Pt pair at open circuit, a voltage response of −14 mV is associated with 200 ppm of NO, −80 mV is associated with 200 ppm of CO, and −40 mV is seen with 200 ppm of NO and 200 ppm of CO. The responses of binary mixtures cannot be strictly additive because of reactions such as that in Equation 11, in which CO may act as a reducing agent to produce inert products CO2 and N2.
2CO+2NO→2CO2+N2 [11]
Accounting for these possible reactions in the gas stream without needing to explicitly define a functional form for these cross interference effects necessitates a flexible analysis technique that artificial neural networks are well suited for.
The distribution of voltage signals generated by the sensors when exposed to the different gas mixtures in 2D PCA space is shown in
Confusion matrices are plotted in
The best result combining features from both sensors was from C3H8+CO where the peak error was 2.5% and >95% of test data is confined to less than 10% error, as seen in
The final test for the artificial neural network was to extract concentration values from a ternary mixture of NO2, C3H8, and CO. Due to mass flow controller limitations on the Environics system, values were restricted to a range of concentrations between 75-175 ppm for C3H8 and 50-150 ppm for NO2 and CO for a total of 148 training data points and 37 test data points for each split. The artificial neural network was modified only by adding an additional neuron to the output layer. The test error distribution is plotted in
The present invention has been described as a mixed-potential electrochemical sensor. It will be understood that the above description is merely illustrative of the applications of the principles of the present invention, the scope of which is to be determined by the claims viewed in light of the specification. Other variants and modifications of the invention will be apparent to those of skill in the art.
This invention was made with Government support under contract no. DE-AC04-94AL85000 awarded by the U. S. Department of Energy to Sandia Corporation. The Government has certain rights in the invention.