Nueva generación de sensores electroquímicos basados en película delgada para la medida de la concentración de co2 en conducciones de gas natural y biogás

Resumo

The development of the modern society has been supported by the exploitation of natural assets like fossil energy sources. Mineral coal, oil and natural gas have been witness of the industrial, economic and social progress throughout history. Today, the natural gas is one of the most used energy sources. However, being a limited good, the global warming and the energetic dependence has promoted the development of renewable energy sources. The biogas is one of the most interesting energy sources. It is obtained from the exploitation of organic wastes generated in farms, garbage dumps or waste water stations. The biogas has a double advantage: the use of the methane generated during the decomposition of the organic waste avoiding its emission to the atmosphere. The biogas and the natural gas follow similar paths. The first one, after an upgrading process might be mixed with the natural without affecting the composition of the last one. However, the monitoring of the composition of both gases becomes an indispensable task and today, already exist different methods to approach this issue. Nevertheless, these methods are expensive, no transportable and, in many cases, they require several sensors to cover the whole detection range. For this reason, this work proposes the fabrication of thin film sensors capable of measuring in a wide detection range (biogas and natural gas). The objective is to improve the performance of commercials detector reducing their costs. For facing this challenge, a thin film electrochemical sensor based on a YSZ electrolyte and a Li2CO3 sensitive material has been developed. The fabrication of this sensor implies several technical challenges concerning the fabrication of the thin film YSZ electrolyte and the Li2CO3 sensitive material because there are only few references reporting the development of this kind of thin films. Topographic, microstructural and electrochemical characterizations has been performed. This has served to optimize the materials performance. The obtained results have present new behavior of the use of carbonate in electrochemical sensors. This works supposes a first step in the use thin film electrochemical sensor based on carbonates and YSZ electrolyte for the detection of gaseous species