Studies of MISiC-FET sensors for car exhaust gas monitoring

The increasing size of the car fleet makes it important to find ways of lowering the amounts of pollutants from each individual diesel or gasoline engine to almost zero levels. The pollutants from these engines predominantly originate from emissions at cold start, in the case when gasoline is utilized, and high NOx emissions and particulates from diesel engines. The cold start emissions from gasoline vehicles are primarily due to a high light-off time for the catalytic converter. Another reason is the inability to quickly heat the sensor used for controlling the air-to-fuel ratio in the exhausts, also called the lambda value, which is required to be in a particular range for the catalytic converter to work properly. This problem may be solved utilizing another, more robust sensor for this purpose. One way of treating the high NOx levels from diesel engines is to introduce ammonia in the exhausts and let it react with the NOx in a special catalytic converter to form nitrogen gas and water, which is called SCR (selective catalytic reduction). However, in order to make this system reduce NOx efficiently enough for meeting future legislations, closed loop control is required. To realize this type of system an NOx or ammonia sensor is needed. This thesis presents the efforts made to test the SiC-based field effect sensor device both as a cold start lambda sensor for gasoline engines and as an NH3 sensor for SCR systems in diesel engines. The MISiC (metal insulator silicon carbide) lambda sensor has proven to be both sensitive and selective to lambda, and its properties have been studied in lambda stairs both in gasoline engine exhausts and in the laboratory. There is, however, a small cross-sensitivity to CO. The influence of metal gate restructuring on the linearity of the sensor has also been investigated. The metal tends to form islands by time, which decreases the catalytic activity and thereby gives the sensor, which is binary when fresh, a linear behavior. Successful attempts to prevent the restructuring through depositing a protective layer of insulator on top of the metal were made. The influence of increasing the catalytic activity in the measurement cell was also studied. It