Abstract
To do breath alcohol measurement, a sensor is necessary that it can detect low alcohol gas concentration of 0.01% at least. In this work, a capacitance-type alcohol gas sensor using porous silicon layer is developed to measure low alcohol gas concentration. The sensor using porous silicon layer has some sensitivity at room temperature by very large effective surface area, but there is still much room for improvement. In this experiment, we measured the capacitance of the sensor under 254 nm UV light on the porous silicon layer, in which alcohol solution was kept in a flask at 25, 35, and $45^{\circ}C$ by a heater. As the result, the improvement of sensitivity by illuminating UV light was observed. The increasing rate of the capacitance was shown to be double more than those measured under UV-off state. It is supposed that UV light activates response of the oriental and interfacial polarizations which have slow relaxation time for AC field.