Interfacial Design and Chemical Sensing Downloaded from pubs.acs.org by 193.56.66.91 on 01/07/19. For personal use only.
Preface RESEARCH IN THE AREA OF CHEMICAL SENSING has grown dramatically in both academia and industry during the past decade. The demand for new sensors that operate with high specificity and sensitivity, as well as low cost, has been driven by an increasing need for environmental monitoring, by modernization of industrial process control systems, and by the desire for improved biomedical technology. The design of these sensors and of interfaces that bind analytes with molecular specificity is a problem that crosses traditional lines of analytical, biological, inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry. Within the past few years, parallel discoveries have been made in these different disciplines that are now beginning to have broad impact on the science of chemical sensing. New paradigms for the synthesis and characterization of designed interfaces and for their integration into practical devices have emerged from this work. The purpose of this volume is to bring together some of the best new research on chemically sensitive interfaces from different relevant disciplines. Twenty-six chapters from leading scientists describe new advances in the synthesis of materials, molecular recognition in analyte- receptor systems, the preparation and characterization of surface thin films, new strategies for chemical signal transduction, and the microfabrication and miniaturization of sensor devices. An overview chapter gives a brief historical review of chemical sensors, as well as a general discussion of rational interfacial design, techniques for the characterization of surface structures, and device technology. It is the hope of the editors and authors of this volume that the reader will be introduced, through brief accounts of recent fundamental research, to the full scope of problems and techniques currently associated with the advancing field of chemical sensors. Generous support by the Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry of the American Chemical Society and by the Petroleum Research Fund has helped to make the symposium and the writing of this book possible. Their contributions are gratefully acknowledged. THOMAS E. MALLOUK Department of Chemistry Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802
D. JED HARRISON Department of Chemistry University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2G2 Canada
March 28, 1994
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