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This paper presents a hydrogen sensor based on palladium-yttrium (Pd-Y) alloy nanosheet. Zigzag-shaped Pd-Y nanosheet with a thickness of 19.3 nm was deposited on a quartz substrate by using an ultrahigh-vacuum magnetron sputtering system and shadow mask. The ratio of palladium to yttrium in the nanosheet was 0.92/0.08. The fabrication process was simple and low-cost, and the sensor can be mass-produced. The experimental results show the sensor has a superior sensitivity, reversibility, and reproducibility. The resistive-based hydrogen detection mechanism in this research is much simpler and more compact compared to the optical-based detection method. Highlights  Pd-Y sensing element was fabricated using a magnetron sputtering system and shadow mask.  The Pd-Y compound consisted of 92% Pd and 8% Y.  The fabrication process was simple, low-cost, and mass-production compatible.  The sensor showed superior sensitivity, reversibility, and reproducibility to hydrogen gas.  The device is more compact than the optical-based counterpart.

In the present work, centrifugal deposited Au-Pd core-shell nanoparticle (NP) film was proposed for the room-temperature optical detection of hydrogen gas. The size dimension of 44, 48, 54, and 62 nm Au-Pd core-shell nanocubes with 40 nm Au core were synthesized following a solution-based seed-mediated growth method. Compared to a pure Pd NP, this core-shell structure with an inert Au core could decrease the H diffusion length in the Pd shell. Through a modified centrifugal deposition process, continues film samples with different core-shell NPs were deposited on 10 mm diameter quartz substrates. Under various hydrogen concentration conditions, the optical response properties of these samples were characterized by an intensity-based optical fiber bundle sensor. Experimental results show that the continues film that was composed of 62 nm Au-Pd core-shell NPs has achieved a stable and repeatable reflectance response with low zero drift in the range of 4 to 0.1% hydrogen after a stress relaxation mechanism at first few loading/unloading cycles. Because of the short H diffusion length due to the thinner Pd shell, the film sample composed of 44 nm Au-Pd NPs has achieved a dramatically decreased response/recovery time to 4 s/30 s. The experiments present the promising prospect of this simple method to fabricate optical hydrogen sensors with controllable high sensitivity and response rate at low cost.

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The failure of hydrogen sensor with palladium film is primarily the phase transition of PdH. To restrain this, a novel palladium and yttrium (Pd-Y) alloy film was prepared by the co-sputtering method and was used to design an optical fiber hydrogen sensor. A sensor model was established based on the optical film matrix method. The relationship between the reflectivity of the film and the hydrogen concentration was discussed. The experimental results show that this sensor is superior to the traditional sensor with Pd in shortening the response and recovery time, restraining drift, and promoting repeatability. The Pd-Y alloy film is an extremely promising material for detecting hydrogen.

Compared with the other hydrogen sensors, optical fiber hydrogen sensors based on thin films exhibits inherent safety, small volume, immunity to electromagnetic interference, and distributed remote sensing capability, but slower response characteristics. To improve response and recovery rate of the sensors, a novel reflection-type optical fiber hydrogen gas sensor with a 10 nm palladium and yttrium alloy thin film is fabricated. The alloy thin film shows a good hydrogen sensing property for hydrogen-containing atmosphere and a complete restorability for dry air at room temperature. The variation in response value of the sensor linearly increases with increased natural logarithm of hydrogen concentration (ln[H(2)]). The shortest response time and recovery response time to 4% hydrogen are 6 and 8 s, respectively. The hydrogen sensors based on Pd(0.91)Y(0.09) alloy ultrathin film have potential applications in hydrogen detection and measurement.

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The small and light-weight pipeline is widely used in hydraulic system for aerospace engineering. The crack is one of the most common failures in the pipelines so that its incipient detection can further avoid the catastrophic damage of the piping system. The electrical and piezoelectric sensors are conventionally used for the structural health monitoring (SHM), while these are not suitable for the cascaded pipelines in harsh environment because the added mass will change the modal characteristics of the cascaded pipelines. The Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensor with light-weight, multiplexed, and anti-electromagnetic interference properties, are employed to obtain the modal strain transmissibility with a novel diagram of the operational modal analysis (OMA). Based on the OMA an enhanced damage indicator is proposed to detect the crack. After going through analytical modeling, finite element modeling (FEM) and its corresponding experiments, it is concluded that the presented method is effective and accurate to detect and locate the crack.