Nanoparticle Engineering and Control of Tin Oxide Microstructures for Chemical Microsensor Applications

Published

September 1, 2001

Author(s)

B Panchapakesan, Don L. DeVoe, M R. Widmaier, Richard E. Cavicchi, Stephen Semancik

Abstract

The use of metal nanoparticles have been investigated as seed layers for controlling the microstructures of tin oxide (SnO₂) films on temperature controllable micromachined platforms has been investigated. The study is focused on SnO₂ due to its importance in the field of chemical microsensors. Nanoparticle seeds of iron, cobalt, nickel, coppor and silver were formed by vapour deposition on the microhotplates followed by annealing at 500 C prior to self-aligned SnO₂ deposition. Significant control of SnO₂ grain sizes, ranging between 20 and 121 nm, was achieved depending on the seed-layer type. A correlation was found between decreasing the SnO₂ grain size and increasing the melting temperature of the seed-layer metals, suggesting the use of high temperature metals as being appropriate choices as seed layers for obtaining a smaller SnO₂ grain structure. Smaller grain diameters resulted in high sensitivity in 90 ppm ethanol illustrating the benefits of nanoparticle seeding for chemical senisng. The initial morphology, particle size and distribution of the seed layers was found to dicate the final SnO₂ morphology and grain size. This paper not only demonstrates the possibility of depositing nanostructured oxide materials for chemical microsensor applications, but also demonstrates the feasibility of conducting combinatorial research into nanoparticle growth using temperature controllable microhotplate platforms. This paper also demonstrates the possibility of using multi-element arrays to form a range of different types of devices that could be used with suitable olfactory signal processing techniques in order to identify a variety of gases.

Citation

Nanotechnology

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1088/0957-4484/12/3/323

Local Download

Keywords

micro-hotplate, microsensor, microstructure control, nanoparticles, nanostructures, seed layer, thin film, tin oxide

Citation

Panchapakesan, B. , DeVoe, D. , Widmaier, M. , Cavicchi, R. and Semancik, S. (2001), Nanoparticle Engineering and Control of Tin Oxide Microstructures for Chemical Microsensor Applications, Nanotechnology, [online], https://doi.org/10.1088/0957-4484/12/3/323, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=830723 (Accessed October 7, 2025)