Viscous damping of microresonators for gas composition analysis

The damping effect of various gas environments on a silicon, lateral microresonator implemented with piezoresistive detection is investigated in this study. The resonant frequency of the cantilever shifts due to viscous damping by an amount that is directly determined by the molar mass of the gas, thereby providing a method to determine the composition of the gas environment. In addition, the microresonator demonstrates the ability to perform ${\mathrm{CO}}_2$ composition analysis using this nonreaction based detection method. The advantages of this gas analysis method are that it is simple, repeatable, reversible and not limited to reactive gases.