An easy-fabricated hydrogen gas sensor based on palladium-decorated polyurethane nanofibers

This paper reports a hydrogen gas sensor based on palladium-decorated polyurethane nanofibers which can be easily fabricated through electrospinning, sputtering, gap generating and adjusting. Extremely narrow gaps between palladium nanostructures with width about 12nm are obtained through stretching aided hydrogen gas exposure and adjusted through further stretching which modulates measurement range and sensitivity of the sensor. This sensor performs a good and fast response (with response time less than 5s and recovery time less than 10s) to hydrogen gas of low concentrations with a good sensitivity and linearity in narrow range (with max sensitivity about 0.32% per ppm in relative resistance change and span less than 100ppm) and a fairly low limit-of-detection (which can be below 50ppm). Therefore, the sensor is suitable for hydrogen gas leak detection.