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RESEARCH NEWS (/RESEARCH-NEWS) / RESEARCHERS AT IISC FABRICATE THE BEST HYDROGEN GAS

% SENSOR IN THE WORLD

When hydrogen gas comes in contact with air, it becomes a bomb. says Prof. Navakanta
Bhat from the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering, and Department of Electrical
Communication Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). Hydrogen gas sensors
have made it possible to detect leaks and maintain high levels of safety. Prof. Bhat and his
group of scientists at IISc have succeeded in designing the best hydrogen gas sensor known
till date.

The sensor consists of a novel design: embedding a thin metal rod inside a semiconductor
shell. An extremely thin rod made of the metal platinum, measuring just 10 nanometres in
thickness (1 nanometre is about the thickness of a human hair) is buried inside an equally
thin 20 nanometre Platinum oxide shell, which looks like a cylinder. The entire core-shell
structure is suspended in air on top of a silicon wafer. Hydrogen gas reacts with oxygen
adsorbed (stuck) on top of sensor surface, and results in electrical current -- to generate an
alert.

This novel sensor has the potential to render the current ones obsolete. Its sensitivity is
around 100 times greater than that of the conventional ones. This means it can sense
hydrogen leaks even when the quantity of hydrogen present is one-hundredth the amount
required for other sensors to detect a leak.

Present sensors need a heater and function at a temperature of around 150C. This sensor
can be deployed at room temperature the power required to run it is almost negligible.
Moreover, the present sensors require battery replacements every six months; this new
sensor can run on a single battery for a 100 years!

It doesnt even need a battery. It can harvest ambient energy like solar energy or even just
the wind. says Prof. Bhat.

The sensor designed by Prof. Bhats group is over a thousand times faster than the ones
currently used. It can generate an alert within a second while the conventional ones take 15
minutes. The sensors currently in use are placed very close to the site to detect leaks. These
super sensitive sensors can even be located a few meters away from the site. This drastically
reduces the number of sensors which need to be deployed on each site. The combination of
these desirable features could make the new sensor at least 50 times more cost effective.

The research team faced many challenges while designing this novel sensor. A thinner device
is more sensitive, but if it becomes too thin, it is prone to breakage. They produced over 300
samples within a few months to zero in on the perfect design. Moreover, the design of this
sensor can be extended to sense low levels of other gases, by using different material
combinations for metal core and semiconductor shell. A graduate student at Prof. Bhats lab
is currently working on devices that could detect hydrogen sulphide, a colourless and highly
poisonous gas. They expect similar results in terms of the response.

About the authors

Prof Navakanta Bhat is at the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering and Department of
Electrical Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Palash Kr.
Basu, Sangeeth Kallatt and Erumpukuthickal Anumol are research scholars with him. The
work was carried out at the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (CeNSE) facility at the
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

About the study

It appeared in the Journal of Applied Physics earlier this month.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4922240 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4922240)

office.cense@iisc.ac.in (mailto:office@cense.iisc.ernet.in)
+91-80-2293 3276 / +91-80-2293 3291

Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (CeNSE),

Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, Karnataka, India.

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