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Study of tin oxide for hydrogen gas sensor applications

Tin oxide (SnO2) has been investigated and used as a gas sensing material for numerous applications from the very start of the sensor industry. Most of these sensors use semiconductors (mostly SnO2) as the sensing material. In this work, SnO2 was prepared using 2 techniques: firstly the MOCVD where we dope the sample with fluorine and secondly sputtering technique where samples are undoped in our case. These samples were tested at different conditions of temperature varying from room temperature to 150 degrees C, in ambient gas atmosphere of 200 CC Nitrogen (N2). The typical thickness of the sputtered samples was 1500 A with a sheet resistance of 300; and these sputtered samples were found to be more porous. These samples when tested in room temperature showed a change of -4 [mu]A change for 10% and -9 [mu]A for 90% of H2.
While at higher temperatures (150 degrees C) the current change for 10% increased from -4 [mu[A to -2 mA showing that higher ambient temperatures increased the sensitivity of the samples. The repeatability of the samples after a period of 3 days were found to be well within 10%. The samples prepared by MOCVD were fluorine doped, the samples were conductive to 1 order of magnitude more than the sputtered ones. 3 different samples of approximate thicknesses 3000, 6000 and 9000 A were prepared and tested in this work, with typical resistivity of 6 /cm and the grains in this case are typically more compact. The conductive samples showed no response at room temperature, including the 6000 and 9000 A samples. While at higher temperatures (150degreesC) the 3000 A sample showed very sensitive response to H2. Also noticed was that the response was linear compared to the sputtered samples. The samples showed very good repeatability and sensitivity.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:USF/oai:scholarcommons.usf.edu:etd-3772
Date01 June 2005
CreatorsAnand, Manoj
PublisherScholar Commons
Source SetsUniversity of South Flordia
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceGraduate Theses and Dissertations
Rightsdefault

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