Design and Experimental Study of a CNT Sensor for Measuring Alcohol Content With Short Response Delay

Excessive alcohol content in human body can impair ability, degrade performance, and result in serious diseases. Nonintrusive and real-time sensing of alcohol content in human body is thus an important research topic. This paper describes the development of a novel carbon nanotube (CNT)-based alcohol sensor with a particular focus on the response delay problem presented in CNT based sensors. Three types of the CNT-based sensor were designed and tested to examine. The result concluded: 1) single-walled CNT is promising as the alcohol sensor with their good linearity and sensitivity and 2) single-walled CNTs with metal pads or without metal pads can both perform well. The second conclusion further implies a great promise of single-walled carbon nanotube with metal pads as alcohol sensors, as the metal pad is an important element to facilitate data reading.