Characterization of Piezoresistive Microcantilever Sensors with Metal Organic Frameworks for the Detection of Volatile Organic Compounds

Metal-Organic frameworks (MOFs) with their high surface area, excellent chemical and thermal stability and analyte specific adsorption make them promising material for gas sensing/storage. In this paper, a vapor detection sensor based on HKUST-1 MOF is presented. HKUST-1 with the above mentioned properties makes it an ideal material to be used with strain based piezoresistive microcantilever sensor. Cantilever sensors which were fabricated, characterized and coated with HKUST-1 were exposed to different Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) including acetone, isopropanol, methanol and water at varying concentrations. From our experiments, we observe that the device is able to distinguish between the different analytes quantitatively based on their time constants for adsorption or desorption. The results show that acetone has the highest time constant while water has the lowest time constant.