Executive Summary : | Environmental and air quality monitoring to a safe limit has become a necessary need for monitoring the quality of our daily life, particularly in the industrial environment. Industries involved in food preservation and refrigeration, petrochemical, pulp and paper, oil and fertilizer need continuous ammonia monitoring where ammonia release is very common. In industry 20 ppm is upper limit for the ammonia release in the working environment and considered as toxic limit for human. Therefore, portable and quick ammonia gas sensor has emerged as one of the most promising device to ensure the safety of the industrial working environment. As per the recent market report the global Ammonia Gas Sensor market is valued USD 20 million in coming years, growing at a CAGR of 20% between 2016 and 2022. However, ammonia sensors are costly and most of the sensors also lack for selectivity and desired sensitivity (below 20 ppm). At present we do not have indigenous low cost ammonia sensors and also economical sensors assembled are not reliable and having interference of humidity/COx. In recent years polymer nanocomposites using 2-D materials like polymer-graphene or polymer-MoS2 nanocomposites got much more attention in the area of gas sensors. The opportunities for use of conjugated polymers – 2D nanocomposites thin film as gas sensors are based on its high performance and unique functionality. ?- conjugated organic semiconductors with nanofillers (graphene and MoS2 etc) open new opportunities. The attraction of organic thin film devices like OFET is the low cost which is significantly below that needed to manufacture conventional devices. However, major limitations are stability and reproducibility apart from requirement of industry feasible fabrication process. Therefore, the investigators have recently introduced a new synthetic and organic film processing methodology which is industrial viable, low cost and resolves the challenges by augmenting the alignment and molecular level assembling of polymer/nanoparticles domains named ‘Floating Film Transfer Methods’ (FTM). Further they developed functionalized graphene and MoS2 nanocomposites of polythiophene derivatives as active materials for sensing of ammonia and developed Transistor based devices, which are having ability to produce amplification by applying gate voltage on gate electrode. The novelty of their work is introduction of functionalized 2-D fillers in the polythiophene derivatives and formation of uniform nano films using FTM technique for low cost and industrial viable devices [Indian Patent Application No. 201811013068; Inventors: R K Pandey and Rajiv Prakash Title “A Polymer or 2D Nano-Composite Film and A Method of Production Thereof”. Based on the extensive work on FTM techniques and OFET device fabrications they are in position to scale-up the technology and technology transfer to industry for development of low cost indigenous ammonia sensor based on polymer nanocomposites. |