Selective gas detection of H2 and CO by a single MOX-sensor

[Display omitted] •Gas analysis of “H2+CO in air” using a single MOX sensor with temperature modulation.•Temperature modulation increased sensory response by almost two orders of magnitude.•Qualitative analysis on the PC plane using the scale-invariant Mahalanobis distance.•Quantitative analysis on the PC plane using polynomial regression and interpolation. The temperature modulation of the SnO2-based metal oxide sensor with the addition of PdOx opened up the possibility of selective analysis of both conventionally one-component systems “hydrogen in air”, “carbon monoxide in air” and conditionally two-component system “hydrogen and carbon monoxide in air”. The aim of this work was the quantitative and qualitative analysis of gases using a single MOX sensor based on a small number of training sample concentrations in the range from 1 to 100 ppm. Gas concentrations in test experiments differed from gas concentrations in the training sample. We also studied the effect of air humidity on the error of the selective determination of gas concentrations in conventionally one- and two-component systems. To reduce multidimensional data in determining analyte concentrations, we used a specific combination of PCA regression analysis algorithms. The temperature modulation of the SnO2-sensor with the addition of PdOx allowed us to increase the sensor responses for concentrations from 10 to 100 ppm by about two orders of magnitude compared to the stationary temperature regime.