A poly(vinylidene fluoride)-coated ZnO film bulk acoustic resonator for nerve gas detection

Abstract

We apply the film bulk acoustic resonator for the detection of nerve gas. The resonator is consisted of a ZnO piezoelectric stack and a W/SiO2 Bragg reflector. Poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) is used as the sensing coating to adsorb the analyte under test. The testing results show that our proposed sensor can yield a sensitive, reversible and reproducible response to nerve gas. The relationship between the frequency shifts and the concentrations of the nerve gas exhibits a perfect linear correlation in the range of 10–50 ppm. The gas sensitivity of the proposed sensor is 718 kHz ppm−1, which is several orders of magnitude higher than that of a quartz crystal microbalance with the same sensitive coating. This study proves that it is feasible to use the PVDF-coated thin film bulk acoustic resonator for the detection of the traced nerve gas.