Performance analysis of Zinc oxide based alcohol sensors

Sensor technology is one of the most significant technology for the future with a constantly growing number of applications, ranging from toxic gas detection, manufacturing process monitoring to medical diagnosis and health monitoring. Among the different existing sensor technologies, the semiconductor sensors are most attractive for their high sensitivity, small size and light-weight construction. Additionally, they are cheap, rugged and simple in operation which makes them suitable for a large number of applications. The n-type metal oxides like SnO2, ZnO, Fe2O3, WO3 are generally used as sensing material for semiconductor sensors. Fortunately, such semiconductor sensors have the ability to detect a very trace amount of volatile organic compounds. The main goal of the present work was to study the long term stability of gas sensors, which are capable of detecting trace amounts of ethanol vapours. In this paper, different types of doped and undoped ZnO nanoparticles have been studied and compared for sensing the concentration of alcohol.