The photo is sourced from news.flinders.edu.au
One of the most common methods of detecting gaseous hydrogen is the application of thermocatalytic sensors, which have been in use for several decades. Their operating principle is quite simple: the active element of the sensor is heated to 400 degrees Celsius, which triggers a flameless oxidation reaction of the combustible gas on the catalyst. Thermocatalytic sensors are characterised by high energy consumption, which is why they receive energy from the common power grid, whereas autonomous power supply from a battery is very difficult to provide.
The MSU scientists attempted to reduce energy consumption via methods used in microelectronics: photolithography and magnetron sputtering, which make it possible to create not volumetric but planar (flat) structures that find application in integrated circuits and semiconductors. This helped reduce the size of the active zone of the device to 150×150 microns in lateral directions and to 30 microns in thickness, which is 3–4 times smaller compared to sensors used today. Since the reduced element heats up faster than standard sensors, the power consumption of the gas sensor has dropped by 50 times, enabling the scientists to use for its power supply a pulse mode, which is widespread in energy storage devices.
“The production of sensors used today involves a large share of manual labour. It’s difficult to automate many stages of creating volumetric structures. Meanwhile, we use the entire toolkit of the microelectronic industry, which potentially allows us to scale up production. Planar technologies make it possible to obtain hundreds of chips on a single plate and automatically perform all required operations on them,” Kirill Napolsky, candidate of chemical sciences and one of the authors of the study, is quoted as saying by MSU.
The new sensor could be in demand not only at energy enterprises, but also in everyday life, including for methane concentration detection. However, scientists will have to ensure its long-term stability for the sensor to be implemented on a mass scale.
