The Oxide Film-Coated Surface Acoustic Wave Resonators for the Measurement of Relative Humidity

Abstract

The surface acoustic wave (SAW) humidity sensor may possess many attractive sensing characteristics such as high sensitivity, high resolution, high stability, frequency output, ease of interfacing, small size, and broad dynamic range. Mostly, the polymer materials are used for the SAW humidity sensor fabrication. But the polymer SAW sensors suffer from broad bandwidth, instability due to ambient temperature, nonlinearity, and small dynamic range. This article presents the fabrication of metal oxide film humidity sensors using SAW resonators of 433.92-MHz frequency. Five different SAW humidity sensors were fabricated by varying the deposited alumina film thickness to measure humidity in the range of 0%–98% relative humidity (RH). The hydrophilic films were formed by dip coating of alumina solution of different molar concentrations. The alumina film is thermally stable and inert. The static and dynamic response characteristics were determined from the shift in resonant peaks at different humidity using an HP 85046A vector network analyzer (VNA). The minimum sensitivity of the least sensitive sensor was found to be 2.51 kHz/%RH. The sensors show linear response ( $R^{2} \ge0.98$ ), high sensitivity (max. ~ 9 kHz/%RH), negligible hysteresis error (≤0.50%), wide dynamic range, and inexpensive fabrication due to the use of commercial resonators. The response parameters of the sensors were compared with the parameters of other oxide SAW sensors reported in the literature. Finally, the linear sensor was interfaced to the electronic and associated signal conditioning circuits to display humidity in %RH.