MEMS based microheaters play an important role in gas sensors. In gas sensors adsorption property of gas sensitive material at elevated temperature is used. For this purpose the microheater should provide uniform heating throughout the sensing surface. This paper describes the structural design and electrothermal analysis of microheater. In this paper, the optimization of the heater geometries is done to obtain better temperature uniformity. Two heater geometries wiz, S-shape and double meander shape are analyzed. MEMS based microheater is used because of their advantage of low power, low cost and small size. COMSOL Multiphysics which is a finite element analysis (FEA) package has been used for this purpose. A voltage of 0.5 V is used to observe the heating profile of the microheater. A sensing layer of gas sensitive material (like ZnO) is deposited over the heater for sensing the presence and concentration of gas. Interdigital transducer placed coplanar with the microheater is used to detect the gas in terms of change in resistance with the change of concentration of the sensitive material. Keywords: Microheater, gas sensor, MEMS, COMSOLCite this Article Mayank Dhull, Anil Arora. Design of MEMS Based Microheater for Enhanced Efficiency of Gas Sensors. Journal of Thermal Engineering and Application. 2015; 2(2): 16–21p.
