Size effect on heat transfer in micro gas sensors

Gas gap is usually used as an important thermal insulation in micro gas sensors to reduce the heating power. The heat transport through the gap consists of two parts, heat conduction by air and thermal radiation between surfaces. It is usually regarded that thermal radiation through the gap is negligible compared with conductive heat transfer by air. This work investigates the heat transport by thermal radiation and heat conduction through a broad size range of gas gaps from one nanometer to dozens of micrometers. The result shows that thermal radiation is the major way of heat transfer when the gap is less than 20 nm, which will result in unexpected high energy consumption in the process of minimization. The equivalent thermal conductivity of thermal radiation is computed and a partition map is depicted to demonstrate the relative importance of radiation and conduction on different gap scales under dissimilar surface temperatures. A practical gas sensor heated by a micro hotplate (MHP) is thermally analyzed. The calculation shows that extra energy consumption comes forth as the gap distance reduces to several tens of nanometers.