TEMPERATURE AND HUMIDITY DEPENDENCE OF THE SENSITIVITY OF SEMICONDUCTOR METAL-OXIDE GAS SENSORS
Keywords:
Keywords: metal-oxide semiconductor; gas sensor; sensitivity; operating temperature; relative humidity; activation energy; surface band bending.Abstract
Abstract. Semiconductor metal-oxide chemiresistors are the dominant platform
for low-cost detection of toxic, flammable and biomarker gases, yet their analytical
figures of merit are strongly governed by two operating variables: the working
temperature and the ambient relative humidity. This paper presents a unified
quantitative treatment of how these two factors shape the sensitivity of SMOx gas
sensors. Starting from the Schottky surface-barrier model of the chemiresistive
transduction, we derive the dependence of the sensor signal on the surface band
bending and show that the temperature response exhibits a characteristic volcano shape
governed by the competition between the Arrhenius-activated surface reaction and the
desorption of ionosorbed oxygen.
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