USE OF COMPATIBLE POLYMER BLENDS TO FABRICATE ARRAYS OF CARBON BLACK-POLYMER COMPOSITE VAPOR DETECTORS

Compatible blends of poly(vinyl acetate) and poly(methyl methacrylate) have been used to produce a series of electrically conducting carbon black composites whose resistance is sensitive to the nature and conce ntration of an analyte in the vapor phase. The de electrical resistanc e response of the composites was found to be a nonlinear function of t he mole fraction of poly(vinyl acetate) in the blend. These compatible blend composite detectors provided additional analyte discrimination information relative to a reference detector array that only contained composites formed using the pure polymer phases. The added discrimina tion power provided by the compatible blend detectors, and thus the ad ded diversity of the enhanced detector array, was quantified through u se of a statistical metric to assess the performance of detector array s in various vapor classification tasks.