2026-10-14T21:16:05Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/34029894 2026-09-30T05:02:58Z category_26971 item_type_12 month_year_09_2026

Decoding Olfactory Sensor Degradation Mechanisms in Harsh Industrial Ecosystems An Explanatory IoT Reliability Framework Davina Liberata Dallo (25141658) Pollution and contamination not elsewhere classified sensor degradation; drift; metal-oxide gas sensors; self-calibration; reliability; explanatory framework Metal-oxide and polymer gas sensors deployed in industrial environments degrade, and the field knows this well enough to have built an extensive compensation literature. What it lacks is an explanation of degradation that connects the physical mechanism to the inferential consequence. Compensation methods are validated by an accuracy metric computed on labelled reference data, which means they are evaluated on their ability to recover a known mapping rather than on their effect upon the meaning of a measurement made after the mapping has moved. This article develops an explanatory framework that reconstitutes sensor degradation as the progressive invalidation of an observation's declared contract : the sensor continues to report, but the terms under which its report may be relied upon have silently expired. We distinguish three strata physico-chemical alteration, operational and environmental influence, and instrumental-network reliability and show that their signatures converge on two outcomes that compensation practice does not address. The first is convergent ambiguity : drifting sensors and genuinely shifting pollution regimes generate indistinguishable divergence, and the discriminator is not the signal but the drift model's own residual. The second is reference erosion : because drift is directionally structured rather than random, the variance directions that compensation removes are the same directions in which sustained regime change would appear. We derive four testable propositions and specify what self-calibration must report to remain verifiable with an emphasis on quantities obtainable at negligible cost, such as self-declared reliability transmitted without additional communication overhead 2026-08-31T00:00:00Z Text Preprint 10.6084/m9.figshare.34029894.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/preprint/_b_Decoding_Olfactory_Sensor_Degradation_Mechanisms_in_Harsh_Industrial_Ecosystems_An_Explanatory_IoT_Reliability_Framework_b_/34029894 CC BY 4.0