Abstract:
Semiconductor gas sensor has many advantages such as small size, high sensitivity and low cost. However, it also has demerit that it has high power consumption due to operational temperature at several hundreds degrees Celsius. Techniques to reduce power consumption for the semiconductor gas sensor are required to be developed. This thesis presents an analysis and a design of a low power consumption heater for the gas sensor. Calculation of the temperature and efficiency of the heater were based on three principles of heat transfer theory which are conduction, convection, and radiation. Analysis of the temperature was done by two methods which are analytical analysis and numerical analysis using Finite Element Method (FEM) in COMSOL Multiphysics. Since heat transfer depends on structures, properties of material, and environment, platinum was used as the heating material in which the initial structure of the heater is a rectangular rod. For the temperature analysis on the heater, a constant electrical resistivity and a linearized model of the radiation equation were assumed first. The results for the analysis of the structure of the heater with the dimension (width×thickness×length) of 50 µm × 0.1 µm × 2,000 µm indicated that if the radiation or the convection were neglected, the temperature are 9% and 41% higher than that of when all the three principles were considered, respectively. It was also found that the linearization of the radiation equation will lead to the decrease of temperature by 5%. In addition, by the estimation of constant resistivity, the temperature will be 21% higher than that of the temperature dependent resistivity. Moreover, this thesis presents the analysis of the efficiency, the ratio between temperatures to power consumption. The length, width and thickness were varied in the range of 0.1 mm 10 mm, 0.1 µm 100 µm, and 0.1 µm 10 µm, respectively. From this condition, the most efficient structure of heater should be designed with the smallest sizes of width and thickness where implementation condition should be considered. While the optimal length will be defined by the width, thickness and properties of the heating material. In conclusion, the optimal dimension (width×thickness×length) for the heater should be 50 µm × 0.1 µm × 2,540 µm. For the applied voltage of 0.2 V, the maximum temperature of 617K will be obtained at the middle of the heater while the power of 0.7 mW will be consumed. In addition, the result indicated that the heater with dimension that is small at the middle and large at the electrode terminal is preferred for the ease of use, high efficiency and low power consumption.