Effect of Polyaniline additions on structural and gas sensing behaviour of metal oxides thin films

The structural and gas sensing behaviour of metal oxides namely TiO2 and ZnO thin films were investigated. In this paper, commercial Polyaniline (PANi) powder were added into two different metal oxides sol gel solutions with PANi : metal oxides weight ratios of 1wt.%, 2wt.% and 3wt.%. The thin films were fabricated using spin coating technique. Structural investigation using XRD presented that all films exhibited amorphous structure. Typical films surface morphology consists of agglomerated round shaped particles with the particles size varies between 57nm to 200nm. Addition of PANi formed network chains between the particles. Ethanol vapor detection test conducted at room temperature showed that both TiO2 and ZnO based films were capable to sense the vapor. The optimum ratio in sensing ethanol vapour for both PANi-TiO2 and PANi-ZnO films was 3:1. However, other issues such as reliability, selectability and repeatability remain as the major problems.