Design of Piezoresistive Microcantilever for VOC Sensing

Abstract

Volatile organic compounds (VOC) are hazardous materials produced from paints, perfumes, petroleum, oil refiners, and plastic products. Aromatic compounds such as benzene, toluene xylene is toxic and can cause health hazards. Determining those toxic compounds is always an exciting topic for most researchers. This paper presents one such approach of designing a sensor for determining the VOCs and piezoresistive microcantilever design is proposed and analyzed.Micro cantilevers are finding a good number of applications in electrochemical applications due to their enhanced sensitivity. The design factors considered are the length, thickness, and materials used to optimize the sensor response. It can be noted that if the thickness of the Cantilever is reduced to improve the deflection sensitivity. But the sensitivity of the piezoresistive sensor depends on the maximum transfer of the stress into the piezoresistive layer. Thus, in this paper, more emphasis was given to the development of the piezoresistive sensing layer concerning the change in stress. The shape of the Cantilever, as well as the piezo layer, are experimented with to reach the optimized condition.It was concluded that the U-Shape structure is giving enhanced sensitivity when compared with other structures. The dimensions (250*80*0.65) of the commercially available micro-Cantilever from Nano sniff technologies were considered. The shape of the cantilever used is rectangular reshaped as a U-shape to obtain enhanced sensitivity.