Development of high sensitivity tin oxide based sensors for gas/odour detection at room temperature

An effort has been made to develop thick film tin oxide gas sensors which could detect various gases/odours at room temperature. To achieve this, the fabricated sensors were annealed in oxygen plasma for various durations. It was then found that, the room temperature sensitivity of such sensors was increased to about ten times as compared to the sensitivity of the non-annealed sensors. Further, plasma annealed sensors are found to be practically independent of temperature and the room temperature sensitivity of these sensors are found to be about 1.5 times the sensitivity of the conventional sensors at its operating temperature of 300 degrees C. Studies on the variation of d.c. resistance, sensitivity, temporal response, current-temperature characteristics and impedance spectroscopy with the annealing time have also been made. These studies reveal that, with the increase in annealing time, there is a permanent gradual reduction in the d.c. resistance of annealed sensors. Further, it is also observed that with the increase in annealing time, the response time improves, barrier height reduces, barrier capacitance increases and the dependence of the sensitivity with temperature reduces while the sensitivity itself improves many-fold. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.