Influence of Encapsulation on the Performance of V2O5 Nanowires-Based Temperature Sensors

Abstract

Nanowires (NWs) based sensors have been explored extensively to measure various physical, chemical, and biological parameters as their large surface-to-volume ratio leads to sensitive devices. Further, these sensors can be developed on ultra-flexible substrates. However, often their performance degrades under mechanical bending or when they are exposed to the ambient environment. This could be prevented with suitable encapsulation in most types of the sensors, except the one for temperature sensing where the encapsulation could reduce the efficiency of heat transfer. Addressing this issue, we present here vanadium pentoxide (V2O5) NWs based temperature sensors with nanosilica/epoxy (NS/epoxy) based encapsulation layer. The encapsulation layer is deposited with high resolution electrohydrodynamic printing. The comparison of non-encapsulated and encapsulated devices shows a robust and reliable temperature sensing performance from the later. This study shows how the sensing performance can be preserved and the lifetime of flexible sensors elongated by using an encapsulation layer.