Smart electrochemical oxygen sensor for personal protective equipment
Journal article, 2012

Self contained closed circuit rebreathers are life supporting breathing systems, where the exhaled gas is recycled by filtering CO2 and replacing metabolized O-2. For the O-2 injection control galvanic O-2 sensors are used to measure the partial pressure of O-2. A malfunction of the sensors can lead to a gas mixture beyond life supporting limits which is life threatening. Galvanic O-2 sensors are often used in anaesthetic machines in hospitals. Also in this case, a malfunction of the sensors can cause severe injury to a person. It is obvious that such sensors are key elements in life supporting equipment and as such must be designed in order to achieve high functional safety. However these sensors are consuming sensors, and with that, will fail at a certain time. Failure modes include current limitation, non linearity, electrolyte evaporation or leakage, etc. Within this paper a novel low cost read out electronic circuit for galvanic O-2 sensors is presented, which allows not only digital readout, digital temperature compensation, on board storage of calibration and manufacturing data, but also can be used for performing voltammetry cycles to test the Pb anode for exhaustion. First measurements are presented and compared to data from a Solartron SI 1287 impedance analyzer, which is state-of-the-art in electrochemical sensor characterization.

oxygen

rebreather

Galvanic

validation

voltammetry

sensors

personal protective equipment

Author

Arne Sieber

Peter Enoksson

Chalmers, Applied Physics, Electronics Material and Systems

A. Krozer

IEEE Sensors Journal

1530-437X (ISSN) 15581748 (eISSN)

Vol. 12 6 1846-1852 6096351

Areas of Advance

Transport

Production

Subject Categories

Other Engineering and Technologies

Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

DOI

10.1109/JSEN.2011.2178593

More information

Created

10/7/2017