International Journal of Applied Science and Engineering Research

Ethanol gas is a hypnotic or sleep producer gas having toxic nature. The persons working on ethanol synthesis have great chances of being victims of respiratory and digestive track cancer. So there is a massive demand and rising challenges for monitoring ethanol gas. The present work is focused on the fabrication and characterization of pure and aluminum oxide doped n-type semiconducting zinc oxide based ethanol sensors prepared using thick and thin film technologies. Characterization of samples by XRD and SEM provided valuable information about the structural and morphological properties of nanoparticles. Doped and pure ZnO samples show good crystallinity having wurtzite hexagonal structure. In case of thick film sensor, sensitivity of pure ZnO towards 400 ppm ethanol gas is 56.53% and sensitivity of Al2O3 doped ZnO film is 80.34%. For thin film sensor, sensitivity of pure ZnO is 59.44% and sensitivity of Al2O3 doped ZnO is 94.29%. The sensitivity of Al2O3 doped ZnO is found to be more than the sensitivity of the pure ZnO. It is also observed that the sensitivity of thin film is better than the sensitivity of thick film. The response and recovery time is of the order (∼6s) and (∼ 20s) respectively.