We present a comparative study of two types of sensor with different transduction techniques but coated with the same sensing material to determine the effect of the transduction mechanism on the sensing performance of sensing a target analyte. For this purpose, interdigitated electrode (IDE)-based capacitors and quartz crystal microbalance (QCM)-based resonators were coated with a zeolitic⁻imidazolate framework (ZIF-8) metal⁻organic framework thin films as the sensing material and applied to the sensing of the volatile organic compound acetone. Cyclic immersion in methanolic precursor solutions technique was used for depositing the ZIF-8 thin films. The sensors were exposed to various acetone concentrations ranging from 5.3 to 26.5 vol % in N₂ and characterized/compared for their sensitivity, hysteresis, long-term and short-term stability, selectivity, detection limit, and effect of temperature. Furthermore, the IDE substrates were used for resistive transduction and compared using capacitive transduction.

The phase angle of a fractional-order capacitor's (FOC) impedance has a constant value between −90° and 0°. Maintaining this value over a broad frequency band is of utmost importance since it increases the applicability of the electrical circuit that employs the fractional-order capacitor (FOC). In this work, a molybdenum disulfide (MoS2)-ferroelectric polymer composite is used to design/fabricate an FOC. The resulting FOC's bandwidth of operation, which is defined as the frequency band where the variation in the phase angle is no more than ±4°, is five decades between 100 Hz and 10 MHz, a 3 decades improvement over the best reported state of the art. The value of the constant phase angle can be tuned from −80° to −58° by changing the type of the ferroelectric polymer in the composite and the volume ratio of MoS2. The results presented in this work demonstrate the potential of the FOCs fabricated using MoS2-ferroelectric polymer composites in robust and accurate realization of various electrical systems.

We report on the fabrication of an advanced chemical capacitive sensor for the detection of sulfur dioxide (SO2) at room temperature. The sensing layer based on an indium metal–organic framework (MOF), namely MFM-300, is coated solvothermally on a functionalized capacitive interdigitated electrode. The fabricated sensor exhibits significant detection sensitivity to SO2 at concentrations down to 75 ppb, with the lower detection limit estimated to be around 5 ppb. The MFM-300 MOF sensor demonstrates highly desirable detection selectivity towards SO2 vs. CH4, CO2, NO2 and H2, as well as an outstanding SO2 sensing stability.