Evaluation of inkjet printed heaters array for chemo-resistive gas sensor

Abstract

Heaters are an indispensable part of gas sensing platforms. It serves to heat the sensor, which increases the sensitivity of the active layer and helps in the desorption of the detected gas. The sensors are also heated to stabilize the parameters against the ambient temperature. For the fabrication of electronic circuits and devices including sensing platforms and heating structures is becoming increasingly popular to use flexible electronics. In particular, the use of inkjet printing technology allowing localized deposition of ink at low temperatures on a large area. Many kinds of inks such as conductive, semi-conductive, or dielectric can be used. In this research, we present the design preparation, simulation, fabrication, and characterization of the inkjet printed heaters. The structures are based on silver nanoparticle ink printed on a flexible substrate and are sintered with intense pulsed light. The printed heaters consist of connection pads, interconnection pathways, and heater patterns. Two types of heater patterns were designed (meander and dual-spiral type). Both of the prepared patterns were simulated in Ansys simulation software to obtain the heat distribution. The microheaters were printed on a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate and characterized with a thermal imaging camera. Based on the results obtained from these measurements, a calibration plot was created.