Room temperature non-balanced electric bridge ethanol gas sensor based on a single ZnO microwire**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61574026 and 11405017) and the Liaoning Provincial Natural Science Foundation, China (Grant No. 201602453).

Abstract

In this paper, ultra-long and large-scaled ZnO microwire arrays are grown by the chemical vapor deposition method, and a single ZnO microwire-based non-balanced electric bridge ethanol gas sensor is fabricated. The experimental results show that the gas sensor has good repeatability, high response rate, short response, and recovery time at room temperature (25 °C). The response rate of the gas sensor exposed to 90-ppm ethanol is about 93%, with a response time and recovery time are 0.3 s and 0.7 s respectively. As a contrast, the traditional resistive gas sensor of a single ZnO microwire shows very small gas response rate. Therefore, ethanol gas sensor based on non-balanced electric bridge can obviously enhance gas sensing characteristics, which provides a feasible method of developing the high performance ZnO-based gas sensor.