Electrochemical sensors for monitoring environmental pollutants.

Stricter environmental controls on the emission and discharge of chemical pollutants are creating an increased demand for the development of improved chemical sensor devices. Although electrochemical sensors show great promise for this task, their utility has been constrained by a number of practical problems, the most serious being the effect of surface adsorption of impurities leading to non-reproducible response. This review presents a survey of recent advances in electrochemical sensor technology which have attempted to improve the performance of these devices. Three main areas of development have been addressed; advances in sensor design and measurement techniques, novel approaches to conferring electrode selectivity and the use of microminiaturization and microelectronics fabrication techniques. Recent applications and future prospects for the measurement of toxic metals, organics and gases including volatile organic compounds are surveyed.