Graphene has great potential to be used for humidity sensing due to its ultrahigh surface area and conductivity. However, the impact of different atomic layers of graphene on the SiO2/Si substrate on humidity sensing has not been studied yet. In this paper, we fabricated three types of humidity sensors on the SiO2/Si substrate based on one to three atomic layers of graphene, in which the sensing areas of graphene are 75 μm × 72 μm and 45 μm × 72 μm, respectively. We studied the impact of both the number of atomic layers of graphene and the sensing areas of graphene on the responsivity and response/recovery time of the prepared graphene-based humidity sensors. We found that the relative resistance change of the prepared devices decreased with the increase of number of atomic layers of graphene under the same change of relative humidity. Further, devices based on tri-layer graphene showed the fastest response/recovery time, while devices based on double-layer graphene showed the slowest response/recovery time. Finally, we chose devices based on double-layer graphene that have relatively good responsivity and stability for application in respiration monitoring and contact-free finger monitoring.
Keywords: graphene; humidity sensor; recovery time; respiration monitoring; response time; responsivity.