Micro-/Nanocombined Gas Sensors With Functionalized Mesoporous Thin Film Self-Assembled in Batches Onto Resonant Cantilevers

This paper reports a novel top-down/bottom-up combined resonant microcantilever chemical sensor, where the nanosensing material of a functionalized mesoporous thin film (MTF) is directly self-assembled on the sensing region of the integrated microcantilever. By using the batch-producible nano-on-micro construction technique, a large number of such sensors can be batch fabricated with uniform performance and low cost. More importantly, the sensing molecule terminals can be simultaneously constructed at the pore inner surface when the MTF is directly grown on the cantilever. With -NH₂-group-functionalized MTF directly grown onto the surface of the cantilever free end, the micro-/nanocombined gravimetric sensor has experimentally exhibited quick response and highly sensitive detection of CO₂ gas.