Energy-efficient atmospheric CO concentration sensing with on-demand operating MOX gas sensor

Collaborative mobile air-pollution monitoring, employing context aware sampling scheduling, requires on-demand sensing of gas concentration. If MOX gas sensors are used, their energy consumption can be reduced by on-demand heating, with a risk to compromise the sensing repeatability. We experimentally investigate response of MiCS-5525 CO MOX sensor to intermittent heating sequences consisting of a train of short rectangular pulses. We analyse stability of response, energy consumption and sensitivity at low concentrations, for various combinations of pulse waveform period and duty-cycle. We obtained stable readings for the heating sequences consuming 200-300 mJ, saving over 30% of energy per reading.