The sensitivity enhancement of TiO2-based VOCs sensor decorated by gold at room temperature

Mostafa Shooshtari; Sten Vollebregt; Yas Vaseghi; Mahshid Rajati; Saeideh Pahlavan

doi:10.1088/1361-6528/acc6d7

The sensitivity enhancement of TiO₂-based VOCs sensor decorated by gold at room temperature

Nanotechnology. 2023 Apr 6;34(25). doi: 10.1088/1361-6528/acc6d7.

Authors

Mostafa Shooshtari¹, Sten Vollebregt¹, Yas Vaseghi², Mahshid Rajati³, Saeideh Pahlavan⁴

Affiliations

¹ Laboratory of Electronic Components, Technology, and Materials, Delft University of Technology, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands.
² Department of Electrical Engineering, K.N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
³ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON N9B 3P4, Canada.
⁴ School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran 14395-515, Iran.

PMID: 36958031
DOI: 10.1088/1361-6528/acc6d7

Abstract

Detection of hazardous toxic gases for air pollution monitoring and medical diagnosis has attracted the attention of researchers in order to realize sufficiently sensitive gas sensors. In this paper, we fabricated and characterized a Titanium dioxide (TiO₂)-based gas sensor enhanced using the gold nanoparticles. Thermal oxidation and sputter deposition methods were used to synthesize fabricated gas sensor. X-ray diffraction analysis was used to determine the anatase structure of TiO₂samples. It was found that the presence of gold nanoparticles on the surface of TiO₂enhances the sensitivity response of gas sensors by up to about 40%. The fabricated gas sensor showed a sensitivity of 1.1, 1.07 and 1.03 to 50 ppm of acetone, methanol and ethanol vapors at room temperature, respectively. Additionally, the gold nanoparticles reduce 50 s of response time (about 50% reduction) in the presence of 50 ppm ethanol vapor; and we demonstrated that the recovery time of the gold decorated TiO₂sensor is less than 40 s. Moreover, we explain that the improved performance depends on the adsorption-desorption mechanism, and the chemical sensitization and electronic sensitization of gold nanoparticles.

Keywords: gas sensors; room temperature; thermal oxidation; titanium dioxide; volatile organic compounds.

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