Surface Acoustic Wave Sensors Based on Nanoporous Films for Hydrogen Detection

Abstract

Surface Acoustic Wave Sensor is one of the most promising detection systems due tosmaller size, lower weight, power requirements and great sensitivity. It is known from the liter-ature that Pd and ZnO are the most promising materials for detecting hydrogen. A nanoporousPd and ZnO based layered SAW sensors have been developed and investigated for hydrogen,at room temperature. The sensors were of a delay line type (quartz substrate, 70 MHz cen-tral frequency). The nanoporous sensitive layer was directly deposited onto a quartz substrateusing a picosecond laser ablation method. Lasers with picosecond pulses or a high repetitionrate leads to major changes in the ablation process and implicit in the deposited lm struc-ture. Thus, using such a regime, at a certain ambient gas pressure, we have the advantage ofdirectly obtaining a nanoporous lm. The sensor performances (sensitivity, limit of detectionand response time), for a hydrogen concentration in synthetic air of 0.015 2 % were studied.For a concentration between 0.2 - 0.8 % hydrogen/synthetic airs, the response times was 15 -44 s and 6 - 27 s in case of Pd lms and ZnO respectively. Limit of detection was about 6.3times better at Pd sensors (50 ppm) than ZnO sensors (315 ppm).