SiC Based Field Effect Gas Sensors for Industrial Applications

The development and field-testing of high-temperature sensors based on silicon carbide devices have shown promising results in several application areas. Silicon carbide based field-effect sensors can be operated over a large temperature range, 100-600 °C, and since silicon carbide is a chemically very inert material these sensors can be used in environments like exhaust gases and flue gases from boilers. The sensors respond to reducing gases like hydrogen, hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide. The use of different temperatures, different catalytic metals and different structures of the gate metal gives selectivity to different gases and arrays of sensors can be used to identify and monitor several components in gas mixtures. MOSFET sensors based on SiC combine the advantage of simple circuitry with a thicker insulator, which increases the long term stability of the devices. In this paper we describe silicon carbide MOSFET sensors and their performance and give examples of industrial applications such as monitoring of car exhausts and flue gases. Chemometric methods have been used for the evaluation of the data.