Abstract
Here, a silicon nanopillar array (Si-NPA) was fabricated. It was studied as a room-temperature organic vapour sensor, and the ethanol and acetone gas sensing properties were detected with I-V curves. I-V curves show that these Si-NPA gas sensors are sensitive to ethanol and acetone organic vapours. The turn-on threshold voltage is about 0.5 V and the operating voltage is 3 V. With 1% ethanol gas vapour, the response time is 5 s, and the recovery time is 15 s. Furthermore, an evaluation of the gas sensor stability for Si-NPA was performed. The gas stability results are acceptable for practical detections. These excellent sensing characteristics can mainly be attributed to the change of the overall dielectric constant of Si-NPA caused by the physisorption of gas molecules on the pillars, and the filling of the gas vapour in the voids.
Highlights
In recent years, gas sensors have received much attention because of serious environmental pollution caused by the rapid development of modern industry [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The inset image gives the corresponding fast Fourier transform (FFT) pattern, which confirms that this inset image gives the corresponding fast Fourier transform (FFT) pattern, which confirms that this array is regular hexagonal shape
We have fabricated a room-temperature gas sensor based on a silicon nanopillar array, and the corresponding ethanol and gas acetone gas sensing properties were studied
Summary
Gas sensors have received much attention because of serious environmental pollution caused by the rapid development of modern industry [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Tan et al reported that a highly sensitive ethanol gas sensor was designed based on the mechanism of ethanol quasi-molecular imprinting [19]. These gas sensors demonstrated excellent performance, further development of Si-based material sensors—such as porous silicon [20,21] and silicon pillar [22,23]—is desirable, as it would make the assembly of the sensors much simpler, cheaper, and more portable because of their ease in integrating with the already-existing Si integrated circuit technology. The room-temperature organic vapour (ethanol and acetone gas) sensing properties of Si-NPA were studied, and the underlying mechanisms wererate, analysed based on[22,23]. The results strongly indicated that Si-NPA might be a promising sensing material for future gas sensor applications
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