Ultra-thin Glass Based Flexible, Transparent and Ultra-sensitive Surface Acoustic Wave Humidity Sensor with ZnO Nanowires and Graphene Quantum Dots

Jianhui Wu, changshuai Yin, Jian Zhou, Honglang Li, Yi Liu, Yiping Shen, Sean Garner, Richard Fu, Huigao Duan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

111 Citations (Scopus)
23 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Flexible electronic devices are normally based on organic polymer substrate. In this work, ultra-thin glass based flexi-ble, transparent and ultra-sensitive ZnO/glass surface acous-tic wave (SAW) humidity sensor is developed using a compo-site sensing layer of ZnO nanowires (NWs) and graphene quantum dots (GQDs). It shows much larger effective elec-tromechanical coupling coefficients and signal amplitudes, compared with those of flexible polymer based SAW devices reported in literature. Attributed to large specific surface are-as of ZnO NWs, large numbers of hydrophilic functional groups of GQDs, as well as the formation of p-n heterojunc-tions between GQDs and ZnO NWs, the developed ZnO/glass flexible SAW sensor shows an ultra-high humidity sensitivity of 40.16 kHz/%RH, along with its excellent stability and re-peatability. This flexible and transparent SAW sensor has demonstrated insignificant deterioration of humidity sensing performance, when it is bent on a curved surface with a bend-ing angle of 30, revealing its potential applications for sens-ing on curved and complex surfaces. The humidity sensing and human breathing detection have further been demon-strated for wearable electronic applications using ultra-thin glass based devices with completely inorganic materials.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)39817–39825
JournalACS Applied Materials and Interfaces
Volume12
Issue number35
Early online date10 Aug 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 Sept 2020

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