Portable Luminescent Sensor for Volatile Organic Compounds

The LUMIVOCS project will exploit the recently developed luminescent Guest@MOF composite materials, which exhibit unique phototunable properties to engineer a revolutionary sensor device to achieve low concentration ppm-level detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Such a compact VOC sensor could be deployed for toxic VOC detection in industry and sustainability applications, or, for use in diabetes diagnostics in the healthcare and biomedical sectors.

Hitherto, none of the commercial VOC sensors in the market can fulfil the requirements of high sensitivity, high selectivity, and low cost all at once.

The 18-month LUMIVOCS project will de-risk the proposed technology by delivering proof-of-concept data needed to move forward towards a commercial application.

To this end, the major questions that will be addressed will encompass the following areas. (i) Engineering and prototyping of a compact VOC sensor device; (ii) Evaluation of detailed sensor performance; (iii) Assessment of sensor resilience against cross contamination and photobleaching; (iv) Manufacturability, sensor lifetime and mechanical resilience.

The work will be conducted in collaboration with two industrial collaborators who will provide important technical input and will lend direction to the project to facilitate commercialisation.