Insecticide Monitoring in Cattle Dip with an E-Nose System and Room Temperature Screen-Printed ZnO Gas Sensors

Archibald W. Rohde (), Jacqueline M. Nel and Trudi-Heleen Joubert
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Archibald W. Rohde: Carl and Emily Fuchs Institute for Microelectronics (CEFIM), Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa
Jacqueline M. Nel: Department of Physics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa
Trudi-Heleen Joubert: Carl and Emily Fuchs Institute for Microelectronics (CEFIM), Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa

Agriculture, 2023, vol. 13, issue 8, 1-25

Abstract: Taktic, an Amitraz-based insecticide, is commonly used in sub-Saharan Africa to treat cattle for ticks. Due to misuse in rural dipping pools, some ticks are showing resistance to Taktic. This work presents a low-cost e-nose with commercial sensors to monitor Taktic levels in dipping pool water. The device shows distinctly different measurements for the odours of air, distilled water, farm water, and four levels of Taktic insecticide in farm water. A naive Bayes algorithm with a Gaussian distribution is trained on the data and a validation set achieves a 96.5% accuracy. This work also compares two sol-gel ZnO nanoparticle solutions with an off-the-shelf ZnO nanoparticle ink for use as active material in chemiresistive gas sensors to be employed in an e-nose array. The ZnO solutions are screen-printed onto gold electrodes, auto-sintered with a built in heater, and used with UV illumination to operate as low-power, room temperature gas sensors. All of the screen-printed ZnO sensors show distinct changes in resistance when exposed to Taktic vapours under room temperature and humidity conditions. The custom room temperature ZnO gas sensors fabricated via facile and low-cost processes are suitable for future integration in a point-of-need microsystem for the detection of Taktic in water.

Keywords: gas sensors; metal-oxides; ZnO; Amitraz; Taktic; e-nose; nanoparticles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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