Chemical Sensors: An Introduction for Scientists and Engineers

Chemical Sensors: An Introduction for Scientists and Engineers , Peter Gründler , Springer, New York, 2007. $99.00 (273 pp.). ISBN 978-3-540-45742-8

Chemical Sensors: An Introduction for Scientists and Engineers is a 273-page monograph that offers what its subtitle claims. But I would qualify the text even further as an introduction to chemical sensors for undergraduate students studying chemistry, physics, or engineering. At that level of presentation, understanding the subject requires only high-school-level physics and chemistry.

The book is well organized; its 10 chapters include an introduction to and discussion of the fundamentals of chemical sensors. Its coverage of semiconductor structures as chemical sensors and of chemical sensors as detectors and indicators provides some information for novices in the field. The discussion of specific types of sensors is divided into four main principles of chemical transduction, the conversion of a molecular reaction into a measurable output signal: heat (thermal sensors), inertial mass (mass sensors), electrochemical (potentiometric and amperometric sensors and chemiresistors), and optical (optical fibers and planar waveguides). Surprisingly, capacitive sensors are unnecessarily treated as a separate subgroup of electrochemical sensors; they should have been included under chemiresistors.

Gründler is a professor at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden in Germany. His book, a translation of the 2004 German edition, is well balanced, without undue emphasis on any specific area but one—the author goes into depth in the final chapter when discussing hybridization sensors, his area of interest. The chapter not only covers each type of hybridization sensor but also contains a brief but useful description of its practical applications. That chapter should create a warm and fuzzy feeling in the hearts of engineers, who otherwise could interpret the book as just another treatise on some abstract instrumentation.

The author covers a few controversial devices, such as microfabricated reference electrodes and potentiometric immunosensors. Microfabricated reference electrodes, although frequently described in the literature, are not realistic due to their small volume and short lifetime. Likewise, alluding to potentiometric immunosensors is misleading because direct potentiometric measurement of a change in charge from immunochemical reaction is not possible. Luckily, those points are not elaborated on in any detail and therefore can be disregarded.

The elementary level at which the book is written leaves the reader with a comfortable feeling that there are no problems left in the field of chemical sensors and that everything regarding sensors works just fine. Interestingly, that characteristic is precisely why the book can serve well as an introduction to chemical sensing but also why it should not be considered as a foundation for graduate research.

Gründler’s approach could be a good marketing tool, and it could also lure unsuspecting novices to the field of chemical sensors. Numerous multiauthored books, such as Sensors Update (Wiley-VCH, 1996–2003), edited by Henry Baltes, Wolfgang Göpel, and Joachim Hesse, and the many volumes of the Springer Series on Chemical Sensors and Biosensors (2004–2007), edited by Otto Wolfbeis, discuss chemical sensors in much greater depth. A serious researcher would certainly have to consult those texts, or something similar to them, to find out the complete story of chemical sensors.