Abstract
The soil moisture sensor is of utmost importance in agriculture due to issues including water conservation and disease prediction. This work presents the design and development of a molybdenum trioxide (MoO3) based capacitive soil moisture microsensor. The sensor comprises an inter-digitated electrode (IDE) on a silicon wafer and MoO3 is drop cast on IDE, which acts as the sensing film. IDE on Si wafer is mounted on the printed circuit board (PCB) and electrical contacts are taken out. During the lab measurements, we observed changes of 153 pF to 400 pF for different soil moisture ranges of 7% to 55% respectively in the black clayey soil. The response time for the fabricated microsensors is around 120 seconds in the soil for all types of measurements. Further, the change in response of the sensor is 16% when the temperature varies from 25 ᴼC to 50 ᴼC. Thus, we conclude that MoO3 is one of the potential oxides in the capacitive sensor platform and can be used for the in-situ soil moisture sensing.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | 2019 IEEE SENSORS |
| Publisher | IEEE |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781728116341 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 15 2020 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank DeitY, MCIT, and Government of India for the financial support through Centres of Excellence in Nanoelectronics, IIT-Bombay. Authors are thankful for the support received from Prof. D. N. Singh, Geotechnical lab, IIT-Bombay for characterization of soil samples. Authors are also thankful to Professor Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University for providing the soil samples and useful interaction with them related to the soil texture.