Molybdenum disulfide catalyzed tungsten oxide for on-chip acetone sensing

Acetone sensing is critical for acetone leak detection and holds a great promise for the noninvasive diagnosis of diabetes. It is thus highly desirable to develop a wearable acetone sensor that has low cost, miniature size, sub-ppm detection limit, great selectivity, as well as low operating temperature. In this work, we demonstrate a cost-effective on-chip acetone sensor with excellent sensing performances at 200 °C using molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) catalyzed tungsten oxide (WO3). The WO3 based acetone sensors are first optimized via combined mesoscopic nanostructuring and silicon doping. Under the same testing conditions, our optimized mesoporous silicon doped WO3 [Si:WO3(meso)] sensor shows 2.5 times better sensitivity with ∼1000 times smaller active device area than the state-of-art WO3 based acetone sensor. Next, MoS2 is introduced to catalyze the acetone sensing reactions for Si:WO…