Uncertainty Propagation and Global Sensitivity Analysis of a Surface Acoustic Wave Gas Sensor Using Finite Elements and Sparse Polynomial Chaos Expansions

The aim of this work is to perform an uncertainty propagation and global sensitivity analysis of a surface acoustic wave (SAW) gas sensor using finite elements and sparse polynomial chaos. The SAW gas sensor is modeled using finite elements (FEM) under COMSOL, and the sensitivity to DCM of its Sezawa mode is considered to be the quantity of interest. The importance of several geometrical (width and PIB thickness), material (PIB Young’s modulus and density), and ambient (pressure, temperature, and concentration) parameters on the sensor’s sensitivity is figured out by means of Sobol’ indices using sparse polynomial chaos expansions. It is shown that when the variability of the input parameters is low (inferior to 5%), the only impacting parameter is the cell width. However, when the variability of the input parameters reaches medium levels (around 10%), all the input parameters except the ambient temperature are impacting the sensor’s sensitivity. It is also reported that in the medium variability case, the sensor’s sensitivity experiences high variations that can lead to a degradation of its performances.