Fabrication of Platinum Functionalized Zinc Oxide Nanorods for High-Performance Acetylene Gas Sensor Integrated with Microheater

Abstract

The rapidly expanding infrastructure dictates the need for ubiquitous distributed low power, low-cost, high sensitivity gas sensor. In the past few decades, metal-oxide semiconductors have been investigated widely as gas sensing materials. However, their low sensitivity and high operating temperature (about 400-500 °C) have significant limitations. To resolve these problems, here, we report the Pt activated ZnO nanorods (NRs) as a highly sensitive material for MEMS compatible miniaturized acetylene gas sensor at low operating temperature. Further, before fabrication COMSOL simulation was performed to optimize the micro-heater design. The fabricated Pt functionalized ZnO NRs based sensor exhibits an ultrahigh response toward 1 ppm acetylene with faster response and recovery compared to state-of-the-art sensing characteristics.