Chemical sensor technology is among the fastest growing fields in modern analytical chemistry and can be identified as a key technological area. Since the mid-1980s the number of publications has tripled and corroborates impressively the vitality of this field.
In general, the increasing interest in sensing systems is driven to a significant extent by the multifaceted range of in-situ and online applications demanded in the field of environmental monitoring, industrial process analysis and control, biological/biochemical analysis and high-throughput screening in the medical/pharmaceutical field. Although with different motivation, common to these areas is the acceding effort toward selective, substance specific analystical methods, which should preferably enable continuous, specific determination and quantification of the respective analytes in real time. Once an almost exclusive domain of separation techniques, such as gas and liquid chromatography, the latter requirement of continuous information in real time serves as substantial argument for sensing systems or analytical devices combined with sensing techniques. TOC:Introduction to Optical Chemical Sensors.- Fundamental Optical Principles.- Spectroscopy.- Waveguide Technology.- Introduction to Sensing Materials.- Polymer Membranes.- Sol-gel Materials.- Dyes, Indicators, Labels, Probes.- Methodology.- Optical biosensors.- Sensing Schemes.- Selected Application Examples.