Facile and Low Cost Temperature Compensated Humidity Sensor and Signal Conditioning System

Abstract

Most relative humidity sensors are resistive or capacitive sensors. It’s a fact that the resistance and capacitance of a vast majority of such sensors also depend on the surrounding temperature and a change of temperature can cause significant errors in the final reading of relative humidity. This fact of temperature dependence is scarcely investigated in development of humidity sensors. In this work, a very simple temperature compensation method has been developed that automatically eliminates the effect of change in temperature from the final output without requiring separate measurement of temperature or any data processing. Amorphous polyethylene oxide (PEO) was used as the active material for humidity sensor owing to its high sensitivity and almost linear response. Interdigitated type sensor electrodes (IDE) were fabricated using reverse offset printing on glass substrate and the active layer was deposited through spin coating. An identical twin sensor was fabricated with the same parameters and was additionally encapsulated form the open environment. The dummy sensor was used as opposing pair with the active sensor in a bridge configuration to achieve temperature compensation. The bridge sensitivity was recorded to be ~2.9 mV/%RH that was further improved to 100 mV/%RH using a differential instrumentation amplifier based signal conditioning circuit. The sensor system was deployed in a real-life relative humidity measurement with changing temperature that returned a remarkable accuracy of 98.76%. The error due to temperature dependence reduced from 22.4% to just 1.24%. The transient response time of the sensor was found to be ~2.4 s.