Molybdenum disulfide catalyzed tungsten oxide for on-chip acetone sensing

Abstract

© 2016 Author(s).Acetone sensing is critical for acetone leak detection and holds a great promise for the noninvasive diagnosis of diabetes. It is thus highly desirable to develop a wearable acetone sensor that has low cost, miniature size, sub-ppm detection limit, great selectivity, as well as low operating temperature. In this work, we demonstrate a cost-effective on-chip acetone sensor with excellent sensing performances at 200 °C using molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) catalyzed tungsten oxide (WO3). The WO3 based acetone sensors are first optimized via combined mesoscopic nanostructuring and silicon doping. Under the same testing conditions, our optimized mesoporous silicon doped WO3 [Si:WO3(meso)] sensor shows 2.5 times better sensitivity with ∼1000 times smaller active device area than the state-of-art WO3 based acetone sensor. Next, MoS2 is introduced to catalyze the acetone sensing reactions for Si:WO3(meso), which reduces the operating temperature by 100 °C while retaining its high sensing performances. Our miniaturized acetone sensor may serve as a wearable acetone detector for noninvasive diabetes monitoring or acetone leakage detection. Moreover, our work demonstrates that MoS2 can be a promising nonprecious catalyst for catalytic sensing applications.