Abstract
This paper investigates the determination of the concentration of a chemical vapor as a
function of several nonspecific microcantilever array sensors. The nerve agent dimethyl
methyl phosphonate (DMMP) in parts-per-billion concentrations in binary and ternary
mixtures is able to be resolved when present in a mixture containing parts-per-million
concentrations of water and ethanol. The goal is to not only detect the presence of
DMMP, but additionally to map the nonspecific output of the sensor array onto a
concentration scale. We investigate both linear and nonlinear approaches — the linear
approach uses a separate least-squares model for each component, and a nonlinear
approach which estimates the component concentrations in parallel. Application of both
models to experimental data indicate that both models are able to produce bounded
estimates of concentration, but that the outlier performance favors the linear model. The
linear model is better suited to portable handheld analyzer, where processing and memory
resources are constrained.
