From Gas Sensors to Detection of Etanol Vapour to Sensor of Bacteria Detection

Abstract

Introduction. Metal oxide semiconductor sensors have many advantages. But their working temperature is still high and their sensitivities are frequently low. In the current work, I present the results from investigation of sensing ability of new kind of potentiometric solid state gas sensor.Aim. The main goal of this work is investigation of the temperature dependence in the flow of air and in ethanol vapour mixture of the investigated junction structures. Also, we investigated at fixed temperature the dependence of the thermoelectric force from the ethanol vapour concentration at possible low operation temperature. For the structure, which shows the lowest operation temperature to ethanol vapour, we investigate the ability to detect Pseudomonas putida suspension.Materials and methods. In this work, the sensitivity to ethanol vapour and Pseudomonas putida suspension were investigated by measuring the thermoelectric force (the voltage) appearing of the structures by standart voltmeters.Results. Two experimental installations for sensors have been developed. The first one is for detection of ethanol vapour by ZnO/ZnO:Cu, ZnO/ZnO:CuO, ZnO/ZnO:Fe junction structures. The second installation was for Pseudomonas putida suspension detection in gas phase by ZnO/ZnO:Fe junction structure. We discovered that ZnO/ZnO:Fe structure, has the lowest operation temperature of 200 °C to ethanol vapour. For this structure, the potential difference has a negative value and decreases with increasing the amount of the pulverized bacteria.Conclusion. We discovered that ZnO/ZnO:Fe structure, has the lowest operation temperature of 200 °C. This operation temperature is a bit higher than operation temperature of at which some very novel sensing structures shows the maximum sensitivity.