Broadband Dielectric Spectroscopic Detection of Ethanol: A Side-by-Side Comparison of ZnO and HKUST-1 MOFs as Sensing Media

Published

June 25, 2022

Author(s)

Papa Amoah, zeinab Hassan, Pengtao Lin, Engelbert Redel, Helmut Baumgart, Yaw S. Obeng

Abstract

We leverage thermal- and chemical-induced changes in microwave propagation characteristics (i.e., S-parameters) to compare ZnO and surface anchored metal-organic-framework (HKUST-1 MOF) thin films as sensing materials for detecting ethanol vapor (VOC). We show that the microwave propagation technique can detect ethanol, a typical volatile organic compound, at relatively low temperatures (< 100 °C), as well as afford new mechanistic insights that are inaccessible with the traditional dc resistance-based measurements. In addition, the metrology technique avoids the inimical measurand distortions due to parasitic electrical effects inherent in the conductometric volatile organic compound detection. The most common gas sensors are based on chemically induced changes in electrical resistivity and necessarily involve making imperfect electrical contacts to the sensing materials which introduce errors into the measurements.

Citation

Chemosensors

Volume

10

Issue

7

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.3390/chemosensors10070241

Local Download

Keywords

Broadband dielectric spectroscopy, ZnO, Metal-organic-framework (MOF), ethanol vapor detection

Citation

Amoah, P. , Hassan, Z. , Lin, P. , Redel, E. , Baumgart, H. and Obeng, Y. (2022), Broadband Dielectric Spectroscopic Detection of Ethanol: A Side-by-Side Comparison of ZnO and HKUST-1 MOFs as Sensing Media, Chemosensors, [online], https://doi.org/10.3390/chemosensors10070241, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=934630 (Accessed October 8, 2025)