Contents I. Introduction
Carbon nanotubes have been studied intensively due to their importance as building blocks in nanotechnology. A number of chemical sensors based on carbon nanotubes have been proposed in the recent years, especially for Volatile Organic Compound (VOC), , , and detection in gaseous environments [1]. The main drawback in using such materials is that due to their low selectivity against given chemical species, no straightforward information about the analytes present in the test environment is achievable in case of a multicomponent gas mixture. However, the use of pattern recognition methods is very useful in these cases, where the correlation between data obtained by complementary transducers is used to enhance the discrimination capability of the whole hybrid system. Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes (SWCNTs) have already been exploited as highly sensitive materials by the authors for the development of high-performance VOC Silica Optical Fiber (SOF) sensors [2], [3]. In this work, for the first time (to our best knowledge), the excellent sensing properties of carbon nanotubes have been used for the detection of chemical pollutants in aqueous environments at room temperature. As matter of fact, experimental results reveal the stability of the SWCNTs film within the aqueous environment as well as the capability of SWCNTs-based SOF sensors to detect low concentrations of toluene in water.
