Monitoring of toxic (CO, NO2, H2S, SO2, etc.) and combustible (H2, CH4 and other hydrocarbons) components in the atmosphere is an extremely important task for ensuring safety in living rooms and industrial plants. For the efficient operation of currently widespread semiconductor and thermocatalytic gas sensors, it is necessary to heat their sensitive elements to a temperature of hundreds of degrees centigrade. The main disadvantages of sensitive elements used in modern stationary gas analyzers are high (more than 100 mW) power consumption, as well as low resistance to impact loads, which hinders their use in portable devices for gas atmosphere analysis.
Our group has proposed and successfully implemented the method of planar microheaters formation [1], which allows one to reach temperatures of an active element above 500 °C. As a basis for the developed microheaters the anodic alumina films are used, the important advantages of which, in front of other materials, include an open porous structure, high thermal stability and mechanical strength, good adhesion of metal and catalytically active layers. The developed devices are characterized by low power consumption, low inertia, and extremely high resistance towards impact loads.
[1] I.V. Roslyakov, K.S. Napolskii, V.S. Stolyarov, E.E. Karpov, A.V. Ivashev, V.N. Surtaev. A thin-film platform for chemical gas sensors // Russ. Microelectron., 47 (2018) pp. 226-233. DOI: 10.1134/S1063739718040078.