Invited Talk: Flexible Printed Acoustic Gas Sensors: A Path Towards Low Cost Sensing (IEEE Sensors Council Chapter)

#Sensors; #Flexible #electronics; #Gas #sensing; #Printed #sensors

In recent years, printed electronics has attracted significant level of interest due to simplified processing steps, reduced material wastage, low fabrication cost, and simple pattering techniques. Since printed electronics requires low temperature processing and can handle substrates of any material and size, it is compatible with flexible devices as well. According to IDTechEx the total market for printed, flexible and organic electronics will grow from $29.28 billion in 2017 to $73.43 billion in 2027. Gas sensors are one of the important application areas for flexible printed electronics.

Among different types of gas sensors acoustic wave (AW) gas sensors are of great interest. With the advancement in flexible printed electronics, researchers have started to fabricate flexible printed AW gas sensors as they are low cost, conformable and have lower frequency of operation than their rigid microfabricated counterparts.  Although these features are attractive, AW gas sensors developed with flexible printed electronics technology by researchers have poor performance. In this talk, the presenter will identify the basic limitations of developing high performance flexible printed AW gas sensors, such as low piezoelectric charge constants of flexible piezoelectric materials, poor adhesion between printed conductive layer and flexible substrate and conventional circuit topologies used. She will present emerging processes, new materials and novel circuit topologies developed at her laboratory to push some of these current limitations. She will present some examples of high performance flexible printed AW sensors used for volatile organic compounds and carbon dioxide sensing. As gas sensors can play an important role for the growth of IoT, this is high time to apply flexible printed electronics in gas sensing area.