Microheater Structures to Achieve Uniform Temperature Distribution for Flexible Gas Sensing Application

Microheater is an integral part of gas/vapor sensing systems. Here, a set of microheater structures on a PET substrate of 10 mm x 10 mm x 0.2 mm dimension are studied for flexible gas sensing applications. Three different geometrical structures such as double meander (DM), double meander with a perpendicular electrode (DMPE), and N-shaped (NS) heating circuit have been designed and electro-thermal analysis has been performed. The temperature distribution over the microheater shows NS has the highest uniformity over the other two structures, which is 74.70% over DMPE (least uniform). The dimension and shape of the structure are considered based on integration feasibility with gas sensor arrays. It is found that NS has the lowest power consumption (44.37 mW) among others, which is 34.02% lower than DM (highest power consumption). Hence, NS is the best structure both in terms of temperature uniformity and power consumption. The study of the heaters can bring insight to improve the performance of gas sensing arrays in the flexible domain.