AlN FBAR Particle Sensor With a Thermophoretic Sampling Mechanism

Pollution by particulate matter (PM) poses a serious and growing risk to human health. Film Bulk Acoustic Resonators (FBARs) have been proposed as a low-cost way to monitor particle concentration. This paper presents particle detection by a 1.1 GHz aluminium nitride based FBAR designed and fabricated by SilTerra Malaysia. The FBARs are used in a differential configuration with one sensing and one reference device in a system comprising a microchannel with an electric microfan and a thermophoretic precipitator microhotplate array for improved sampling. A custom-built test chamber was designed to characterise the device at different levels of particulate matter concentration in air. The particle feed rate into the test chamber was varied between 9.5, 19, 43, 66 and $94~\mu \text{g}/\text{m}^{3}\text{s}$ . The FBAR frequency was found to decrease with increasing particulate matter concentration in the test chamber air. The experiments were conducted with and without the microchannel and it was found that the sampling channel increased sensitivity of FBAR resonant frequency to particle concentration per cubic meter of air from 5 Hz/ $\mu $ gm−3 to 20 Hz/ $\mu $ gm−3. The detection limit in this test was estimated at ca. $50~\mu \text{g}/\text{m}^{3}$ , which is around current European limits for PM10 pollution. In addition, the use of the sampling microfan to aid cleaning of FBARs after particle measurement was also investigated and found to be feasible especially for lower particle concentration.