Abstract
A novel flexible room temperature ethanol gas sensor was fabricated and demonstrated in this paper. The polyimide (PI) substrate-based sensor was formed by depositing a mixture of SnO2 nanopowder and poly-diallyldimethylammonium chloride (PDDAC) on as-patterned interdigitated electrodes. PDDAC acted both as the binder, promoting the adhesion between SnO2 and the flexible PI substrate, and the dopant. We found that the response of SnO2-PDDAC sensor is significantly higher than that of SnO2 alone, indicating that the doping with PDDAC effectively improved the sensor performance. The SnO2-PDDAC sensor has a detection limit of 10 ppm at room temperature and shows good selectivity to ethanol, making it very suitable for monitoring drunken driving. The microstructures of the samples were examined by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscope (TEM) and Fourier transform infrared spectra (FT-IR), and the sensing mechanism is also discussed in detail.
Highlights
Ethanol gas sensors can be applied in many fields, such as the control of fermentation processes [1], safety testing of food packaging, and can be fixed on vehicle steering wheels to monitor drunken driving [2,3]
(>200 °C), so we have focused our attention on the development of flexible sensors for the detection of ethanol at room temperature, which avoids the need for heaters on the substrates, and makes the assembly of the sensors much simpler, cheaper and more portable [5]
We have investigated a novel flexible ethanol sensor based on SnO2 doped polydiallyldimethylammonium chloride (PDDAC), in which poly-diallyldimethylammonium chloride (PDDAC) acted as both the binder and the dopant
Summary
Ethanol gas sensors can be applied in many fields, such as the control of fermentation processes [1], safety testing of food packaging, and can be fixed on vehicle steering wheels to monitor drunken driving [2,3]. To meet the need of analyzing gas mixtures, and to overcome the poor selectivity and high cost problem of popular sensors, organic-inorganic hybrid composite sensors are being intensively investigated [15,16,17,18]. They can complement the disadvantages of pure inorganic and organic materials. Ram et al [17] synthesized poly(ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT)/SnO2 composite thin films, and studied their gas sensitivity to NO2 These hybrid materials-based gas sensors exhibited much higher sensitivity than that of the pure inorganic and organic materials-based gas sensors.
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