Alcohol sensing performance of ZnO nano-flower based resistive sensor: Comparative study

Abstract

A comparative study on alcohol sensing performance of ZnO nano-flowers is reported in this paper. Chemical bath deposition technique was employed to develop the nanostructure on a sol-gel grown seed layer deposited on SiO2 substrate using Zinc Acetate Dihydrate and Hexamethylenetetramine (HMT) precursors in DI water in the mass ratio of 1:3. After structural (XRD, FESEM) characterizations, the sensor was tested for sensing alcohol (methanol and ethanol) vapor at 250°C in dynamic range of 100 to 700 ppm. The sensor showed high response magnitude ~85.45% with ~9.6 sec response time at methanol vapor but while obtaining ~54.90% response magnitude at ethanol vapor with very low response time 2.83 sec in 700 ppm at a temperature of 250°C.