Temperature-Programmed Resonant Microcantilever For Quantitative Evaluation of Nanomaterial Sensing Characteristics

As a typical kind of greenhouse gas, Freon refrigerant significantly harms the environment and should be detected at low concentrations. In this paper, ZSM-5 zeolites are used as catalysts to improve the sensing performance of ZnO-based sensor to the typical Freon refrigerant of R134a. To quantitatively evaluate the activities of the ZSM-5 catalysts, resonant microcantilever integrated with a microheater is designed and fabricated. The frequency-shift brought by the heating induced desorption of probe molecules is used to represent the activities of the ZSM-5 catalysts. According to the measured frequency-shifts, the activities of the four candidate zeolites can be optimized without the trial-and-error tests. The gas sensing results well verify the evaluation results, which indicates that the resonant microcantilever can be used to quantitatively characterize the activities of catalysts for gas sensor usages.