Effect of Humidity on Gas Sensing Performance of Carbon Nanotube Gas Sensors Operated at Room Temperature

Mostafa Shooshtari, Alireza Salehi, Sten Vollebregt

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

32 Citations (Scopus)
208 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have shown promising results for gas sensing due to their high surface area. Since humidity has a great impact on the electrical conductivity of resistive CNT gas sensors, we have investigated the change of humidity on their sensing properties. In this study, we fabricated vertically aligned CNT-based gas sensors for the detection of volatile organic compounds. The morphologies and phase structures of the fabricated samples were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), confirming the presence of CNT with some surface impurities. It was found that a relative humidity increase from 10% to 80% can reduce the electrical conductivity of the sensor by around 4%. On the other hand, for a humidity above 80% the conductivity increased slightly. The fabricated device has been used as a gas sensor for volatile organic compounds, and the cross-sensitivity to humidity was investigated. It was found that in the fabricated sensors, a change in humidity up to 80% results in a 40% decrease in the response for the studied organic compounds.
Original languageEnglish
Article number9261626
Pages (from-to)5763-5770
Number of pages8
JournalIEEE Sensors Journal
Volume21
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Carbon nanotubes
  • cross-sensitivity
  • gas sensors
  • humidity
  • volatile organic compounds

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